LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



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UNITED STATES OP AMEEIOA. 



PROCEEDINGS 



AT THE 



WYCLIFFE SEMI-MILLENNIAL 
CELEBRATION, 



BY THE 



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Held in the Academy of Music, New York, December 2, 1880, 



i o Commemorate the First Translation of the Holy Scriptures into the 
English Language, by 



MaKu Wl%tl%fn. 



NEW YORK: 
AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY, 

INSTITUTED IN THE TEAR MDCCCXVL 

1881. 



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Page 

Outline of the Proceedings 5 

Prayer, by Roswell D. Hitchcock, d. d., ll.d. . . 7 

Address, by the Hon. Joshua L. Chamberlain . . 9 

Oration on John Wycliffe and the first English 

Bible, by Richard S. Storrs, d. d., ll.d. ... 13 

Address, by Cortlandt Parker, Esq 61 

Address, by Enoch L. Fancher, ll.d 67 

Benediction, by Thomas E. Vermilye, d.d., ll.d. . 71 



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This Commemoration, for which the Board of Managers had made 
the most careful preparation, and to which many had been looking 
forward with high hopes, proved to be an occasion of unparalleled 
interest. 

More than four thousand persons gained admission to the Academy 
of Music by ticket; and it is quite impossible to conceive how any 
company of people could be assembled in one place more thoroughly 
representative of the intellectual force, the culture, the dignity, the 
moral worth, and the godliness of this vast community than was that 
body which met, on the evening of the second day of December, to 
commemorate the work of John Wyceiffe as the Translator of the 
First English Bible. 

Promptly, at the hour designated for opening the exercises, the 
platform being crowded by the distinguished guests who had been 
specially invited by the Board to attend, Frederick S. Winston, 
Esq., one of the senior Vice-Presidents of the Society, in a few 
well-chosen words, introduced one of his associates in office, the 
Hon. Joshua L. Chamberlain, of Maine, as the presiding officer 
of the evening. 

At the President's request, the vast assembly rose and united in 
singing, to the tune of Coronation, the hymn beginning, 

"All hail the power of Jesus' name I " 

It was .true worship — reverent, hearty, grand. We do not expect to 
be more profoundly impressed by any service of song until we are 
permitted to join the u great multitude, which no man could number." 
The Rev. G. F. Krotee, d.d., pastor of the Holy Trinity 
Lutheran Church in this city, then read the nineteenth Psalm and 
the last three verses of the first chapter of Second Peter. Prayer 
was offered by the Rev. Roswele D. Hitchcock, d.d., el. d., 
president of the Union Theological Seminary. 



6 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

At the conclusion of the devotional exercises, the President de- 
livered a pertinent and eloquent address, and introduced the Rev. 
Richard S. Storrs, d.d., ll.d., as the orator of the evening. For 
an hour and forty minutes the speaker held the fixed attention of 
the audience. 

To have been there will prove a perpetual joy. The speaker's 
grouping of historic facts displayed the skill of a master. Many 
passages of the oration were full of power ; but the effect produced 
by his description of the influence of WyclifTe's version of the Scrip- 
tures upon the life of the English people was simply overwhelming. 
When he said, " The lowly English roof was lifted to take in heights 
beyond the stars," it seemed well nigh impossible that the pent-up 
sympathies of the audience could be longer held under restraint, and 
yet it was evident that the climax was in reserve. It was reached 
in a moment more, when he pronounced the memorable words, " The 
bands of darkness broke apart, and the universe was effulgent with 
the lustre of Christ! " Staid and dignified men, under the sway of 
the speaker's eloquence, found tears in their eyes ; and the thousands 
present, moved by the magnetism with which the very atmosphere 
was charged, burst out into loud and long-continued applause. 

After the conclusion of Dr. Storrs's address, a resolution of 
thanks to the orator, and a request for a copy of his address for 
publication, was moved by Cortlandt Parker, Esq., of New 
Jersey, and seconded by the Hon. Enoch L. Fancher, ee.d., of 
New York. Both speakers are Vice-Presidents of the Society, and 
their addresses possess qualities of sterling merit, and are especially 
valuable in their presentation of important points which the plan 
of the principal address did not fully compass. 

As Mr. Fancher took his seat, the President said, "What is 
the pleasure of the Society and of this assembly ? Those who are in 
favour of adopting this resolution of thanks to Dr. Storrs will 
please signify it by rising in their places." The entire audience at 
once arose. Two stanzas of the hymn beginning, 

"From all that dwell below the skies," 

and the familiar Doxology of Bishop Ken, were then sung most 
heartily to the tune of Old Hundred, and the great company received 
the Benediction from the venerable Thomas E. Vermilye, d.d., kl.d., 
senior pastor of the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of 
this city. 



WYCLIFFE SEMI-MILLENNIAL 
CELEBRATION. 



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O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the 
earth ! Who hast set Thy glory above the heavens ; who 
humblest Thyself to behold the things that are in heaven, 
and in the earth ; who art of purer eyes than to behold 
evil, and canst not look on iniquity. Doubtless Thou art 
our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel 
acknowledge us not. Thou didst love us from the founda- 
tion of the world, and, in the fullness of time, didst send 
Thy Son to save us. 

We thank Thee for the revelation Thou hast made of 
Thyself in the world around us, which proclaims Thine eter- 
nal power and godhead ; we thank Thee for the revelation 
made in us who bear Thine image ; but, above all, do we 
thank Thee for the revelation vouchsafed unto us in the 
blessed volume of Thy word. We thank Thee for those 
holy men of God who spake as they were moved by the 
Holy Ghost ; whose line is now gone out through all the 
earth, and their words to the end of the world. We thank 
Thee for Thy great gift unto our fathers in the father-land, 
and, through them, unto us who now for these many 
generations have heard in our own tongue, wherein we 
were born, the wonderful works of God. 



8 Wy cliff e Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

We thank Thee for the memory of Thy servant, whose 
precious gifts of nature and of grace, whose steadfast 
endurance of contradiction, hatred, and hardship, and 
whose great service on our behalf, we celebrate to-night. 
As he rises now upon our vision, may we catch something 
of his martyr-spirit, and be moved to do our part in con- 
tinuance of his blessed work. 

Command Thy benediction upon the occasion which has 
called us together. Bless us, each and all, speakers and 
hearers; and help us all in the prayer which our Lord 
hath taught us : Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed 
be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on 
earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily 
bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those 
who trespass against us. And lead us not into tempta- 
tion ; but deliver us from evil : For Thine is the kingdom, 
and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen. 



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The circumstances under which I so unexpectedly 
occupy this chair forbid my attempting any address worthy 
of the place so courteously offered in your programme. 
One thought, however, I may express : We meet to-night 
to celebrate, not an accomplished fact, an event which 
has passed, but rather a present and potent source of 
influence, scarcely midway in its career. It is well, doubt- 
less, to turn back in memory to the great characters and 
great deeds of heroic days. It refreshes and braces the 
spirit to drink again at the fountains. But to-night we 
do this, and more. We celebrate noble beginnings, 
living powers, prolific of results long and wide-reaching, 
whose goal and measure can only be found in the con- 
summation of human history. 

The great translations of the Bible into the common 
tongue have appeared in stirring times ; whether as cause, 
or consequence, or concomitant of these, it is not easy 
to say. But the Bible in the hands of the people has 
been associated with movement, and never with stagna- 
tion. I do not mean to assert that its influence is revolu- 
tionary. As a revelation of God's will and saving grace 
to man, it was doubtless a complete revolution for sys- 
tems of ethics and religion, and also for thought and 
life. But as a social force, as revealing man to himself 
in his duties and rights, his capacity and destiny, it has 
been conservative and gradual in its effects. Its process 
has been by evolution rather than revolution. We cannot, 
for instance, hold Wycliffe responsible for the agrarian 
and socialistic revolts which marked and followed his 



10 Wy cliff e Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

times. His Bible was an enlightenment and a power, 
disclosing men to themselves and quickening in them 
the craving for that deliverance from evil which is the 
crowning prayer, as it will be the crowning fact in his- 
tory; but it did not prompt men to wanton and wicked 
assaults on the orderly and peaceful courses of social 
advancement. 

The stirring history of that Bible we shall listen to 
with delight from the distinguished orator of this occa- 
sion. Suffer me only to dwell a moment more on the 
thought with which I began — the abiding and growing 
influence of the English Bible. 

For two great peoples it has happened, that the com- 
mon version had a powerful influence on the common 
speech. Applied to the expression of vital and heart- 
reaching truths, and answering the deepest questions of 
the soul, it seized upon the inmost strength and sweetness 
of the native idiom of home and life. This being at a 
formative and characteristic stage of its growth, it may 
be said that the common version held fast and conse- 
crated the mother tongue. Who does not know how 
deep inwrought into the life of German and English- 
speaking peoples are these divine thoughts in homely 
phrase ! 

The effect of this — aside from the great fact that this 
is the Word of Life in whatever tongue — on the character 
and destiny of these peoples, can hardly be estimated. 
And when we think how fast the English speech is 
becoming the language of commerce and civilization — 
more potent far than that of courts and courtesy — we 
may not yet be able to conjecture the extent of influence 
to which it is destined. As was said long ago of the 
Spanish flag, and afterwards so eloquently of the English, 
that "the sun never set upon it," so may it with far more 
truth be said of our English Bible, that the sun in all 
his course rises on no meridian of the earth where this 
Bible light is not keeping its watch. Nay, rather be it 
said, it is itself a never-setting sun, whose light, shining 



Address, by Hon. J. L. Chamberlain. 11 

from the east unto the west, is reflected back to the orient 
whence it sprung. 

But the figure falls short of my meaning. For, beyond 
what I have suggested, when we consider the missionary 
homes and mission churches all over the world, where our 
English Bible-tongue is a known, familiar speech, and the 
imagination seeks to trace the blessings that will radiate 
and spread from all these little points of light, they seem 
to encircle the earth like the luminous belts that gird the 
distant stars — or, even like the heavenly galaxy, a stream 
of star-dust growing into worlds. 

But to return to our own country. This is the only 
one in history which may be said to have been founded 
in the spirit and on the precepts of the Bible. Hence 
has grown, I believe, the peculiar prosperity of our 
country. And this book and its teachings remain still 
the charter and safeguard of our liberties, as of our 
salvation. Sad and dire indeed would be the day — which 
God grant may never dawn or darken on the land — when 
the American people should cease to study and know the 
Word of God. 

Whatever modified interpretations advancing science, 
or thought, or life may open ; whatever may be found 
best as to methods and places of study, whether day 
schools, or Sunday schools, or the home circle, most indis- 
pensable of all ; let us never let go from our hearts and 
hands that guide and guardian of life for each and for 
all. How otherwise, indeed, can we deal with the great 
social questions of the day! This cry of the poor and 
lowly, of those whom the march of civilization seems to 
crush to the earth, cannot be answered by the cold maxims 
of political economy or the theories of government. A 
different force and a different spirit must traverse, and be 
transfused into, both our economics and our politics. It 
is not our broad territory, not our rapidly increasing 
population, not our vast and growing wealth, not the 
multiplicity and extent of our industries, which will save 
the Eepublic. It is not this or that distinguished man 



12 Wy cliff e Semi- Millennial Celebration, 

in the highest place, not the triumph of this party or 
that party, which will enable us to meet the ends of 
organized society, which is the well-being of the people. 
It is rather by carrying into practical effect in all our 
human duties the teachings of this sacred Eevelation — 
that there are different gifts indeed and many members, 
but one body, and Christ the head. 

Friends, a duty rests on us to make these truths real 
in life. It is for us to say what meaning these words, 
began five hundred years ago, shall have to those who, 
on another night like this, shall traverse the history of 
a thousand years. 



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Me. President : Ladies and Gentlemen : 

On the left bank of the Bhine, on the site of the 
ancient Eoman camp, afterward an imperial colony, which 
is associated in history with Tiberius and Germanicus, 
with Agrippina, mother of Nero, and with the early fame 
of Trajan, has been recently completed a magnificent work 
of religion and of art, of which more than six centuries 
have witnessed the progress. After delays immensely pro- 
tracted, after such changes in society and government, in 
letters, arts, and in prevalent forms of religious faith, that 
the age which saw its solemn foundation has come to seem 
almost mythical to us, by contributions in which peoples 
have vied with princes, and in which separated countries 
and communions have gladly united, the cathedral of 
Cologne has been carried to its superb consummation, and 
the last finial has been set upon the spires which at length 
fulfil the architect's design. 

Attendant pomps, of imperial pageantry, were natu- 
rally assembled on such an occasion; but they can have 
added no real impressiveness to the structure itself, with 
its solid strength matchiDg its lofty and lovely proportions, 
the vast columns of the nave lifting upon them plume-like 
pillars, the majestic choir, of stone and glass, with its soft 
brilliance and exquisite tracery, beautiful as a poet's 
dream, the soariDg open-work of the spires absorbing and 
moulding hills of rock in their supreme and ethereal grace. 
It seems impossible not to apply to it the words which 

Author's Note,— On account of the length of the following- discourse, portions 
of it were omitted in the delivery, which are retained in the printed copies. 



14 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

Gibbon applied to St. Peter's: "the most glorious struc- 
ture that ever has been applied to the use of religion." 
It is impossible not to rejoice that the common senti- 
ments of beauty and of worship survive the changes of 
civilization, so that distant centuries join hands in the 
work now finished and crowned, and the completion of this 
grandest of cathedrals in Northern Europe fitly attracts 
the attention of Christendom. 

It is a work at first sight insignificant in comparison 
with this, which we have met to commemorate this even- 
ing: the translation of the Scriptures into the common 
English tongue, begun by John Wycliffe five centuries 
ago, and brought to completeness in these recent days 
by the hands of English and American scholars. It may 
seem that the vision of the majestic cathedral is too 
stately and splendid to be set in front of a story so simple, 
and in parts so familiar, as that which we are here to recall. 
But I think it will appear that the work which we cele- 
brate is the nobler of the two ; that from all the costly and 
skillful labours, now completed on the banks of the Ehine, 
we arise to this : even as there one advances to the altar, 
supreme in its significance, through the decorated door- 
ways, along the vast nave, and under the rhythmic and 
haughty arches. To us, at least, the voice of God be- 
comes articulate through the book; while the building 
only shows us the magnificent achievement of human 
genius, patience, and wealth, bringing to Him their un- 
surpassed tribute. 

It is, however, a very plain tale which I have to tell ; 
and the interest of it must lie in its substance, not in any 
ornaments of language or of thought associated with it. 
In order to tell or to hear it aright we have to recall many 
things which lie back of it, which alone can set it clearly 
before us. 

That the governing authorities in the Christian world 
should have ever refused to the revered Scriptures, on 
which the common faith was founded, the widest distribu- 
tion in the various languages spoken by the peoples hold- 



Oration, oy Dr. Storrs. 15 

ing that faith, is a fact so peculiar that we easily ascribe it 
to a crafty ambition or an arrogant self-will, and dismiss it 
as thus superficially explained. We forget how deeply 
rooted it was in an immense system of thought and of 
government, and through what silent organic processes it 
came to evolution into custom and rule. 

Of course it contradicted the earlier usage and plan of 
the Church. The Hebrew and Ohaldaic Scriptures had 
been written in the dialects familiar to the people among 
whom and for whom they were prepared, before and after 
the Eastern captivity. When Greek became a customary 
speech with those dispersed in distant cities, the Alexan- 
drian version of these Scriptures was made; and, as we 
know, in the time of the Master, it was commonly read 
and reverently expounded by the teachers of religion, as 
it afterward long continued in use with Christian converts. 

The Evangelists and Apostles, after the Lord had left 
the earth, wrote accounts of his life, with arguments of 
doctrine, precepts, promises, and prophetic admonitions, in 
the language familiar to themselves and their disciples — 
the vigorous, copious, Hellenistic Greek, to which the 
commerce of the time had given wide distribution, while 
the Septuagint had given it consecration. They sought 
to reach not scholars only, or lettered persons, but all peo- 
ples who shared in the general culture, and all classes of 
people, with the writings upon which their souls were 
engaged, and in which they felt themselves moved and 
helped by the Divine Spirit. The preference of St. Paul 
was shared by all ; it was his preference when dictating or 
tracing the large and slow characters, as well as when 
preaching: "I had rather speak fiye words with my under- 
standing, that by my voice I might teach others also, than 
ten thousand words in an unknown tongue." And it was 
by these Scriptures, in the language which then had chief 
currency in the world, and in which the Eoman Law itself 
was subsequently written, that the knowledge of Him 
in whom is the light and the hope of mankind was soon 
distributed over vast spaces. 



16 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

Yet again, as subsequent need arose that the Scriptures 
be put into other languages, to reach more directly re- 
moter peoples, this was done without opposition, with en- 
couragement indeed, of Church authorities. So came the 
early Latin versions, for use in North Africa or in Italy, 
in the second century. So came the later translation of 
Jerome, from the originals, which became afterward practi- 
cally the Bible of Western Christendom. The Syriac ver- 
sion, which before the end of the second century carried 
the Scriptures to the Euphrates, followed by others in the 
same tongue; the Thebaic, and Memphitic, which made 
them equally at home on the Mle ; the iEthiopic, of the 
fourth century ; the Gothic, of the same period, made by 
Ulphilas ; the Armenian, of the fifth century ; the Arabic, 
Persian, and all the others, to the Sclavonic of the ninth 
century, reveal the same impulse of wisdom and zeal, as 
all are designed to bring the quickening Word of God 
into contact with those to whom the Hebrew and the 
Greek were not familiar. Certainly, for centuries after the 
Ascension, it would have seemed as absurd to restrain the 
Scriptures to languages not understood by the people, as 
it would have been on the crest of Olivet to thrust veils 
of darkness beneath the cloud which received the Lord, 
and to leave the disciples uncertain of his glory. The 
latest and fiercest Eoman persecution, under Galerius and 
Diocletian, aimed especially to destroy the Church by 
destroying its sacred and life-giving books. 

Perhaps nothing else more signally shows the novel 
and alien character of the power which in subsequent cen- 
turies grew up in Christendom than does the fact that 
it wholly departed from these primitive traditions, and 
wrought against them, of settled purpose, with restless 
energy, by an instinct of its nature. I need not repeat the 
story of its rise. I may only remind you how its porten- 
tous physical development allied itself naturally with a 
peculiar doctrine and temper, as the primitive popular 
church-organization, whose picture is ineffaceably preserved 
on immortal records, gave place by degrees to the splendid 



Oration, hy Dr. Storrs. 17 

and vast imperial system, enthroned in the capital which 
still fascinates the fancy and awes the imagination of the 
cultivated world, having prelates for its princes, and extend- 
ing its sway more widely over Europe than had the Empire 
which it followed and surpassed. 

This system was by no means wholly for evil. Un- 
doubtedly, certain needs of the time found in it their spe- 
cial supply, and important benefits to mediaeval society are 
fairly ascribed to it. It held the tumultuous populations of 
Europe to some degree of civilized order, amid stupendous 
changes and strifes, the fall of the Empire, the in-rush of 
barbarians from wood and waste, the utter breaking up of 
the ancient governing order of things. When the sov- 
ereignty of force threatened to become the law of the 
planet, it asserted the supremacy of the spiritual order 
over the secular, in Divine adjustments. It built mon- 
asteries, for those who sought equally seclusion and 
society, with industry, study, and the worship of God. 
It defended those monasteries by sanctions of religion, 
which even breasts that wore mail, and hands that held 
lances, had to regard. It preserved in their libraries the 
scattered remains of the classical literature, as well as 
the Scriptures; and by the labour of monks it multi- 
plied copies of what thus was preserved, and transmit- 
ted them to us. It built cathedrals, and abbey-churches, 
vast poems in stone, which inspire the fond admira- 
tion of Christendom by their melodious and consecrated 
beauty. It established universities, for the teaching of 
its doctrines, but with an inevitably wider effect on 
the culture of mankind. It proclaimed the "truce of 
God," to mitigate and restrain, where it might not 
prohibit, the savage and sanguinary combats of men. 
It loosed the bonds of human slavery from multitudes 
of victims, and honourably refused to recognize distinc- 
tions of bond or free among its officers. It made the 
stoutest baron tremble, in the ecstasy of his passiou, 
before the invisible energy of the curse with which it 
could blast his cruelty or his lust. Sometimes, indeed, 

Wycliffe. 2 



18 Wy cliff e Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

upon kings themselves, when their tyranny was most 
fierce, it laid a hand far heavier than theirs, and held 
them in enforced and reluctant submission. 

Surely it was something to have peoples thus taught 
that there was an authority higher than of princes, a 
right more imperative, a tribunal more august. And I 
cannot but think it beyond dispute that a power was 
exerted from the banks of the Tiber, in different direc- 
tions, between the fifth and the fourteenth centuries, to 
restrain some of the most malign evils, and encourage 
some of the germs of good, in that fateful and perilous 
time. It taught the nations, however obscurely, their 
Christian relationship to each other, and prepared the 
way for International Law; while the out-ranging mis- 
sions of Europe, for the conquest of the heathenism 
which still girt it about, took steadiness, ardour, and a 
regulating order, from this vast Church authority, and 
smote with more effective impact upon the mighty ring 
of darkness. 

The whole system which thus took the place in 
Europe of the earlier, simpler Christian economy, and 
whose existence was for many generations the sovereign 
fact in the history of the Continent, appears now an 
anachronism, as truly as tournaments, feudal keeps, or 
iron helmets. The terrible crozier, before which baton 
and lance went down in fear, has no more place for such 
use in our times than has scale-armour, or the Genoese 
cross-bow. But then it had a great purpose to serve; 
and one who discerns the salutary ends which the 
Church as imperially organized accomplished, may ad- 
mire anew the patience and the wisdom whose silent 
grasp no power eludes, and which even man's wrath at 
last must praise. 

But now it is obvious that with this system of or- 
ganization had grown up one of doctrine and of worship, 
and had been developed spiritual tendencies, whose effects 
were widely and dangerously evil; against which Chris- 
tians had at length absolutely to rebel, to maintain or 



Oration, oy Dr. Storrs. 19 

regain the gospel of Christ. And here it was that the 
Scriptures met their determined antagonist. 

The solemn setting apart of men to offices of perma- 
nent prerogative and control, in a vast, ancient, and 
dominating Hierarchy, almost inevitably induced the as- 
sumption that the Church was in them, as Louis of France 
declared himself "the State," and that men must abide 
in communion with them on peril of losing eternal life. 
In their view, it had commission, this priestly Church, 
with affirmative voice to declare and unfold, even to sup- 
plement, what was taught in the Scriptures. It had 
power, as well, to communicate grace, transmitted through 
it by its Divine Head, on effectual sacraments : giving in 
baptism the germinant principle of spiritual life ; restoring 
it in penance ; nourishing and renewing it in other sacra- 
ments, most of all in the Eucharist. It was in orderly 
development of this system that the very body and blood 
of the Lord were at last affirmed to be in the wafer — 
the Infinite in the finite, the personal presence and glory 
of the Redeemer in material particles; and that thence- 
forth the chief vehicle of grace to the soul which received 
it was held to be not the word of the Master, but this 
figure of bread, over which thaumaturgic words had been 
spoken, and behind whose accidents was the hidden splen- 
dor and life of God's Son. 

With this came naturally a form of worship pictorial 
and spectacular, rather than instructive ; an homage paid 
to the hierarchies above ; the increasing adoration of the 
"Mother of God"; and all the forms of doctrine and 
practice still presented by the modern representative of 
this middle-age Christendom. The entire system, in its 
gradual expansion to its ultimate surprising symmetry and 
vigour, rises before one in the pages of history as plainly 
as the chain of the Cordilleras on a recent ample topo- 
graphical map. It corresponded with the vast politico- 
religious organization in which it was formulated. It 
seemed to supply the reason for that ; and it wrought, with 
and through it, with an energy seemingly inexhaustible. 



20 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

Of course, by its nature, the entire system was pro- 
foundly adverse to the popular reading of the Scriptures. 
It was surely conscious of many things, — in the worship 
of Saints, or of the Virgin, in the efficacy of sacraments, 
the traditional functions of prelates or the Pontiff — for 
which no warrant could be found in the Word, if that did 
not distinctly contradict them, and foretell their mischiefs. 
To allow men to search the Scriptures for themselves was 
practically to suspend the function of the Hierarchy, as 
the authorized expositor of the Divine teaching. All 
divisions of opinion might then be apprehended. A man 
might even come to feel that he had no further need of 
a priest, as the mediator between Christ and his soul, but 
could go himself, in sorrow for sin or in petition for favour, 
to Him whose mind had touched his in the Gospel. It 
could not, indeed, have seemed inconceivable that an 
entire scheme of doctrine, based on the idea that faith in 
the Lord is that which justifies, and that such faith has in 
it the power of the life everlasting, might thus finally ap- 
pear in the world. And the whole pontifical organization 
would be in peril if such an exposition were given to the 
argument of the Pauline epistles. 

It must be observed, too, that what we hold — justly, 
we think — the evil effects of a long withholding of the 
Scriptures from the people, came to furnish fresh argu- 
ment for it. The four-fold significance recognized in 
those Scriptures could only be discerned by devout and 
competent spirits. If then it had come to pass, as plainly 
it had, that neither intellectual nor spiritual insight 
was commonly to be found in religious assemblies — that 
the people who bowed in adoration to images, less grace- 
ful than the Greek and less august than the Eoman, 
who trusted in the wood of the Cross, who rang bells in 
the night to frighten the demons from the air, and who 
only felt the sanctity of an oath as it had been taken on 
ancient relics and unauthenticated bones, that these could 
scarcely be expected to feel the sublime pathos of the 
gospels, or to follow the excursions of Paul's inspired 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 21 

and rapid reason — all the more was it certain to those 
in authority that it would be casting pearls before 
swine, intoxicating weak and unprepared souls with 
precious cordials, to freely open the Scriptures to all. 
Undoubtedly often, to devout minds, it seemed a token 
of reverence for these to keep them apart from ignoble 
hands; while it seemed equally a tenderness to those 
who might be seduced, through misconceiving the Word, 
into dangerous error. 

So it came to pass, in no flash of petulant arro- 
gance, by no inexplicable frenzy of councils, but by a 
logical moral progress, certain and governing, that the 
early plan of putting the writings in which Christianity 
was declared to the world into the hand of every reader, 
for his guidance to the Master, or for his sweeter wis- 
dom and grace, was suspended and antagonized by the 
later plan of keeping all teaching in the hands of the 
priesthood, and reserving to a language understood by 
only the educated class the sacred books. Eeverence for 
these books had preserved them in the monasteries, with 
effectual care. It had caused them to be often tran- 
scribed by the monks, to be splendidly ornamented, 
superbly bound, embossed and enriched with gold and 
gems, till a copy was almost worth in commerce the 
price of a castle. But it had hidden them from the 
touch of the laity with as jealous a care ; and the tend- 
ency to that was as unreturning as the # steady slip of 
the stream to the sea. A distinct prohibition of the 
Scriptures to the people was promulgated at Toulouse, 
a. d. 1229. It had been a rule of the Greek Church 
before. But particular decrees only uttered a rule which 
lay back of all, and was inherent in the system of 
thought from which they sprang. As that system 
became perfected, its tone grew sharper and more impe- 
rious. It watched its domains with a vigilance unsleep- 
ing. And he who thereafter would place the Scriptures, 
in a language familiar, before the people, must cross 
swords with the power which had kings for its vassals, 



22 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration, 

their armies for its troops, and upon the plates of whose 
alleged supernal armour the fiercest chieftains had shiv- 
ered their blades. 

But now it is also to be observed that against this 
tendency had been at least occasional resistance, by 
many of the best among the people, and of the priest- 
hood; and that this had been as manifest as anywhere 
in that earlier England, which, after a frightful paralysis 
of its powers, had come, at just the time of Wycliffe, to 
its incipient resurrection. We have to trace this his- 
tory, also, to get his work, in its impulse, its meaning, 
and its fruitful effect, fully before us. 

The movements toward a more spiritual faith which 
at different times had appeared on the Continent — 
represented in part by the Paulicians, by Claude of 
Turin, by Peter de Bruys, by Arnold of Brescia, or, 
more largely, by Waldo and his followers — these seem to 
have made slight impression on the peoples in England. 
Their relations with the Continent were not close; and 
thought passed slowly, in those sluggish times, from one 
state to another. But among the German peoples them- 
selves, who had conquered Britain, there had been 
developed at different times a practical tendency toward 
freedom in religion, and especially toward a more per- 
sonal and general acquaintance with the Scriptures. 

Of course their history, after settling in England, 
had been very largely one of strife. It startles us to 
remeinber that more than one year out of two, in 
the whole six centuries of their growing domination, had 
been occupied in struggle: against the preceding inhab- 
itants of the country, among themselves, or against the 
roving tribes which had followed; while the breaking 
in of the still pagan Danes, upon the state which was 
painfully striving toward Christian order, immensely 
retarded its moral progress. Yet the active and strenu- 
ous spirit of the Saxons, after they had accepted the 
Christianity which Gregory sent, by the Abbot Augustine 
and his forty monks, had never ceased to work toward 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 23 

better and larger knowledge, and a more secure free- 
dom. The name " Saxon " may not have come, as some 
have derived It, from the short sword-axe, or " Seax," 
which they carried; but the weapon certainly well repre- 
sented their self-asserting and resolute temper, to which 
war was familiar, and which sought utility as the prime 
good in instruments. There was nothing very fine or 
ethereal about them. They were not distinguished for 
brightness of fancy, or moral delicacy, or for unusual 
spiritual insight. But they had a sense of personal right, 
which was vital and strong, with a certain robust prac- 
tical intelligence; while they readily received whatever 
forms of foreign culture they could assimilate. 

They had gained written codes, as one effect of their 
new religion. They had gained a force from the world 
at large, to expand and lift the insular spirit. Arch- 
bishop Theodore, an Asiatic Greek from Tarsus, in the 
seventh century brought to Canterbury an extraordi- 
nary library, containing Greek authors as well as Latin. 
He established important schools in the kingdom, and 
himself taught arithmetic, astronomy, medicine, and 
divinity. The African Abbot, Adrian, who accompanied 
him, was of a like spirit; and in less than a century 
from the landing of the monks, Oaedmon of Whitby was 
reciting to the Abbess Hilda and her scholars the first 
English song — of Creation, of Judgment, and of what 
lies between; Aldhelm, of Maimesbury, was inventing 
the organ, and writing the earliest Latin verse; while 
the eloquence and the sanctity of Cuthbert seemed to 
open heaven to the eyes of those to whom he preached. 
In the following century, Offa, the king, not only struck 
coins and medals, and built an abbey and a palace, but 
he framed laws to promote Christian morals, drew closer 
the relations of England to the Continent, and corre- 
sponded with Charlemagne on matters of commerce and 
education. 

Alfred, of the ninth century, by consent of all one of 
the leading figures in history — not great in opportunity, 



24 Wycliffe Semi- Millennial Celebration. 

but great in mental and moral force — is the typical 
Saxon. He had been upon the Continent, and had 
there had experience of a higher civilization than existed 
in England. He sought to assemble learned men at his 
court, as Grimbald from St. Omer's, and Asser from St. 
David's. He learned Latin himself, in the intervals of 
a life crowded with care and thick with battles, that he 
might open its treasures to others. He translated from 
it Orosius's History, with additions of his own ; Gregory's 
Treatise on the Duty of Pastors; Boethius, on the 
Consolation of Philosophy ; the Ecclesiastical History of 
Bede, and parts of the writings of St. Augustine. He 
personally translated parts of the Scripture, and was 
engaged at his death on a Saxon Psalter. Historians 
find a striking illustration of the range of his thought 
in the fact that he sent ambassadors from England to 
the ancient Christian churches in India. A clearer illus- 
tration appears in the fact that he founded schools 
at Winchester and Oxford — the latter of which has not 
unreasonably been considered the germ of the later 
University; that he sought a higher education for girls, 
as well as for boys; and that he expressed the kingly 
wish that all the free-born English youth should some 
time read with correctness and ease the English Scrip- 
tures. Athelstane, his grandson, was hardly behind him 
in his desire to further learning, and promote moral 
welfare; and he also pressed the translation of the 
Scriptures into the common English speech. The "Dur- 
ham Book," of Latin gospels, with Saxon glosses inter- 
lined, the most beautiful example of Saxon calligraphy, 
is perhaps of his time. 

In spite, therefore, of tides of battle ever rising and 
slowly receding, a true progress had been realized in 
England, in the direction of those attainments which 
have given to the nation its subsequent fame. Men for 
the time distinguished by their accomplishments began 
to appear. The Abbot Benedict brought costly books 
and works of art, on his return from each of his jour- 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 25 

neys to Borne. The Venerable Bede, in trie eighth 
century, found learning, teaching, and writing, as he 
said, a constant delight. He learned Greek, as well 
as Latin, with something of Hebrew, and quoted Plato 
and Aristotle, as well as Seneca, Cicero, and Virgil. 
He left forty-five books to attest his industry, on sci- 
ence, philosophy, as well as theology; and is said to 
have first introduced the use of the Christian era in his- 
torical writing. He drew to himself six hundred schol- 
ars; and he died, as we know, while engaged in trans- 
lating the Gospel of John into the stubborn Saxon 
tongue. Burke calls him "the Father of the English 
learning;" and, though denying him genius, credits him 
with "an incredible industry, and a generous thirst of 
knowledge." 

Alcuin, who came later, the friend and instructor of 
Charlemagne, had been educated at York, where the library 
collected by Archbishop Egbert was already so rich that 
he remembered it with delight and regret from his more 
brilliant Southern home, and longed that "some of its 
fruits might be placed in the Paradise of Tours." Dun- 
stan, of the tenth century, though of a fiery arrogance of 
temper, supremely devoted to the Papacy, was also an 
assiduous student, a designer and painter, a skilful musi- 
cian, with taste in the arrangement of jewels and the illus- 
tration of books, a judge even of embroidery, and fond of 
rich architecture. The literary eminence of the Saxon 
clergy was then acknowledged by other nations. The 
schools, at York, and at Jarrow on the Tyne, were cele- 
brated; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, of the time of 
Alfred, remains, with the exception of Ulphilas's transla- 
tion, the most venerable monument of Teutonic prose. 

The general moral progress of the nation, though not 
rapid or signal, appeared thus secure. Industries were 
multiplied; gardens and orchards began to replace the 
forests, swamps, and pasture-lands ; articles of taste came 
to be frequent, musical instruments, cups of twisted glass, 
or of gold or silver, curiously wrought, which were often 



26 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

exported. The walls of churches were hung not unfre- 
quently with pictures and tapestries, and silver candelabra 
were on the altars. The even-song of the monks at Ely 
floats to us over the centuries, and the Danish Canute's 
enjoyment of it has been commemorated in lovely lines by 
a great English poet. Woman had relatively a high posi- 
tion in the Saxon communities, and freedom was general. 
Kingship had been born of battle ; but the kings were 
little more than elective war chiefs, and the national coun- 
cil could depose them. Assemblies of freemen consulted 
and decided on public questions. County courts, which 
we have inherited, took cognizance of all eases, whether 
temporal or spiritual. Slavery was limited in extent, and 
the body of the people were proprietors or free labourers. 
Those of lower ranks could rise to the higher, like the 
great Earl Godwin. Towns and parishes were more nu- 
merous than on the Continent. Allodial properties were 
widely distributed ; and the Witnagemote, or Assembly of 
Wise Men, including king, clergy, nobles, and gentry, held 
the government of the kingdom in its strong and liberal 
hand. 

In spite, therefore, of wide illiteracy, and of unrefined 
manners, the Saxon people, at the time when Edward the 
Confessor completed his work of fifteen years in building 
Westminster Abbey, were comparatively self-governed, 
energetic, and prosperous. They had liberty of access, 
laymen as well as priests, to copies of the Scriptures, where 
these existed. The Gospel and the Epistle were read in 
English in the churches, and the sermon was so preached. 
Other parts of the Scriptures were in their own tongue. 
^Elfric, in the tenth century, had given an epitome of the 
Old and New Testaments, and had translated portions of 
them, besides quoting in his homilies numerous texts. 
The " Rushworth Gloss," like the Durham, gave the Latin 
of the Gospels, with a Saxon translation ; and still another 
translation of the same sacred records is known to have 
preceded the Conquest. It seems nearly certain that if 
the progress thus commenced had continued unhindered, 



Oration , by Dr. Storrs. 27 

long before the day of Wycliffe, the Bible, in the speech 
of the people, would have been the possession and rich 
inheritance of our rough, but robust, aspiring, and hopeful 
English ancestors. 

At this point, however, breaks in upon their history a 
fracturing force, which certainly long retarded this prog- 
ress, and which seemed for a time wholly to forbid the final 
attainment. I refer, of course, to the Norman Conquest, 

The difference between the Saxon and the Norman was 
not one of blood, since both represented the Teutonic 
stock ; but it was fuller of meaning and of menace for that 
very reason, because the Scandinavian stuff had taken in 
the Normans a peculiar development, which made them at 
once despise and hate their ancient kinsman. Their long 
career as rovers of the seas had perfected in them the na- 
tive fierceness from which the Saxons had been emerging 
into a more domestic habit. Settling in France, in the 
ninth century, and wresting lands and cities from its king, 
these restless pirates — whom Charlemagne, even at the 
height of his power, had seen and feared — entered into 
alliance with the Southern civilization, and became its 
chiefest Northern champions. Dropping their own reli- 
gion and language, they adopted the religion, the lan- 
guage, and the manners, which preceded them in France. 
Its feudal system, in the utmost completeness, they joy- 
fully accepted. Its rites of chivalry, which the Saxons had 
tardily and partially adopted, were practised by them with 
eager devotion, as well as with prodigal splendor and 
pomp. They became the exulting, if not always the pa- 
tient, adherents of the Papacy, whose far-ascending orders 
of rank surpassed their elaborate feudal distinctions, whose 
majestic ceremonial was more sumptuous and brilliant 
than that of their tournaments. And a century and a half 
after their first settlement in France, there was no province, 
from the Channel to the Gulf, more alive than was theirs 
with the spirit and forms of the peoples speaking the 
Eomance tongues. The martial fire burned as ever in their 
veins; but their constitution was feudal, their language 



28 W y cliff e Semi-Millennial Celebration, 

French, the whole tone of their society had been caught 
from the South. 

Descendants of renowned and irresistible conquer- 
ors, "the silver streak" interposed but slight barrier 
between this people and the fertile farms and thriving 
towns, every rumour of which re-excited their greed. 
Their influence had been largely augmented in England 
during the reign of Edward the Confessor. It came to 
its terrific consummation when on Christmas-day, a. d. 
1066, a few weeks after the victory of Hastings, William 
of Normandy was crowned King of England, in that 
Westminster Abbey whose vast extent, massive pillars, 
and cruciform structure showed already the Norman 
impress. His conquest was not fully completed till 
some years after; but from that time the old order of 
things was practically ended, and a new and dreadful 
era began. 

The destruction of properties in the kingdom was 
enormous. The destruction of life, happiness, hope, not 
only in battle, but in the fierce outrage and rapine 
which broke as a fiery flood upon the land, is some- 
thing which cannot be pictured in speech. It is not 
wonderful that men fancied long afterward that fresh 
traces of blood appeared supernaturally on the battle- 
ground near Hastings, as if to show the writhing of the 
land in its immense anguish. In the time of Stephen, 
the Chronicle said, one might travel a day and not find 
one man living in a town, nor any land under cultiva- 
tion. " Men said openly that Christ and his Saints were 
asleep." The feudal system, in all its rigour, took the 
place of the simpler Saxon institutions; and it was 
reckoned, in the third generation after the Conquest, 
that more than eleven hundred castles had already been 
erected. The Saxon clergy, endeared to the people by 
their general steadfastness for the popular cause, were 
driven with violence from their places, to be suc- 
ceeded by Norman monks. Wulfstan, of Worcester, 
was, after a little, the only Bishop of English blood left 



Oration, oy Dr. Storrs. 29 

in his place. The supremacy of the Pontiff, who had 
sent to William his consecrated standard, and who had 
followed his invasion with the first Papal legates in the 
island, appeared finally exalted above all local Episcopal 
rights; and the freedom of the Church seemed to have 
fallen, with that of the State, in final ruin. Even vener- 
ated Saxon saints were displaced from the calendar, as if 
Heaven itself were a wholly Norman institution. 

The language of the people was banished from the 
Court, the councils, the public records, and the Northern 
dialect of France took its place. The native English 
were despised without measure, and despoiled without 
mercy. Many fled across the sea, into the service of 
foreign kings, or of the Greek Emperor. Becket — made 
Chancellor, and Archbishop, under Henry Second — was 
the first Englishman to rise to any distinguished office ; 
and during the intervening century it seemed as if the 
earlier nation had been literally crushed, by the fierce 
onset of overwhelming power, into a helpless and hope- 
less subjection, from which there could be no release. 

It could not but be long, under circumstances like 
these, before the tendencies, active before, had a chance 
to re-appear, seeking again a freer faith, and wider 
acquaintance with the Scriptures. But these tendencies, 
like those to freedom in the State, were radical and 
perennial; and the stubborn struggle through which they 
at last rose to supremacy makes the pages which record 
it of interest to the world. 

In spite of this tremendous overthrow, which had 
fallen like a whirlwind full of thunder and flame on the 
English people, and in spite of the organized military 
oppression under which they long suffered, many things 
remained, and after a time re-asserted their right. The 
old language remained ; and gradually, though slowly, it 
crowded back the Norman dialect, while from that it 
gained important additions. The old laws continued, 
among the people, and the early local institutions. These 
gradually attacked the fabricated strength of the feudal 



30 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

establishment; and every prince who would win popu- 
larity found his readiest resource in ratifying the laws 
of Edward the Confessor. The old life of the people 
remained, unbroken by the desolating strokes it had 
suffered, and with an unconquerable tenacity of purpose 
waiting its time to conquer its conquerors. 

Meantime, it grew evident that many things had come 
with the Conquest, to expand, enrich, and liberalize this 
life, and to make the nation ultimately nobler, in knowl- 
edge and in hope. The monastic school of the Bee, in 
Normandy, was famous throughout Europe, and the great 
archbishops, Lanfranc and Anselm, who came thence to 
Canterbury, established schools, quickened thought, and 
fostered learning. A more uniform church-service was 
established in the kingdom, making worship more attract- 
ive with its statelier harmonies. Our very word " Bible," 
as describing the Scriptures, came with the Normans into 
England. New learnings were absorbed from the now 
nearer Continent. The civil and the canon law became 
the subjects of careful study. Distinguished scholars ac- 
quired a European fame : John of Salisbury, with William 
of Malmesbury, in the twelfth century; Matthew Paris, 
the historian, and sharp critic of Eome, in the thirteenth, 
with Roger Bacon, greatest of mediaeval philosophers, and 
Eobert Grostete, Bishop of Lincoln, most distinguished of 
prelates; Occam, the "invincible" and the "unique," in 
the fourteenth century, with Thomas Bradwardine, pro- 
found in mathematics as well as in theology. Churches and 
monasteries were built in great numbers: the cathedrals 
of Canterbury, Durham, Rochester, Chichester, Norwich, 
Winchester, Gloucester, and others. The Norman spirit 
and manner of treatment gave from the first a new char- 
acter to such buildings, which afterward flowered into 
delightful exhibition in the pointed arches or the lovely 
flowing window- tracery of later cathedrals, as Salisbury, 
or Wells, or in the Westminster chapel of St. Stephen. 

The Universities were organized at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, and attracted wide public attention. An immense 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 31 

enthusiasm for study prevailed among the young. In the 
thirteenth century Oxford was second only to Paris in the 
number of its students. Thirty thousand are said to have 
been there at one time, to learn, as Hume says, "bad 
Latin, and worse logic," but to gain enlargement and 
vigour of thought from even such imperfect studies ; and 
it was the logic of Aristotle which came there, through 
Edmund Eich, afterward Archbishop. The arts of music 
and pictorial illustration took a fresh impulse. The use of 
paper, instead of parchment, multiplied manuscripts. The 
first really English book, the travels of Sir John Mande- 
ville, appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century; 
and libraries then began to be gathered by private persons. 
Better than all, the Norman and the Saxon elements, so 
long exasperated into mutual hate, began to assimilate, 
and to come into union, to form the ultimate English peo- 
ple; and so the old spirit, which had survived Bede and 
Alfred, and had outlived the Conquest, was ready again, 
with larger training, ampler instruments, and a more com- 
plete strength, to take up its interrupted work. 

Already, in the reign of Henry Second, the Norman 
had begun to cease to be conqueror, while the Saxon began 
to rise from subjection. He " initiated," it has been said, 
" the rule of Law." Early in the thirteenth century Magna 
Gharta was won, by the people as well as by barons and 
clergy, in the interest of all ; and distinctions of descent 
thenceforth in large measure disappeared. Under Henry 
Third was added the memorable Charter of the Forest, 
while the Great Charter was solemnly re-affirmed. How 
frequently afterward it was so re-affirmed, every one knows : 
by the weak king, needing popular support; by the strong- 
king, wanting money for wars. Edward Third re-affirmed 
it fifteen or more times, in his single reign. Within two 
centuries after the Conquest, A. D. 1265, Parliament in- 
cluded citizens and burgesses, with nobles and prelates. 
Its name was Norman, its substance English. In the fourth 
year of Edward Third it was ordained that its sessions 
should be annual ; and it constantly insisted on conditions 



32 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

precedent before making its grants, these conditions being 
the enlarged and secured liberties of the realm. Under 
the Edwards immense progress was thus made in the 
law ; and the Royal prerogative, in spite of the glamour 
cast upon it by the later French victories, sensibly 
declined. 

The treatise of Glanville, the earliest probably on 
English law, had been written before; and that of Brac- 
ton had followed it, under Henry Third. The famous 
treatise known as " Fleta," of the reign of Edward First, 
composed probably by order of the king; the tract of 
Britton, in Korman French; the "Mirror of Justice," 
written perhaps a little later, and probably by a Saxon — 
these show the progressive activity in legal discussion. 
Year-books, containing authentic reports of adjudged 
cases, preceded the reign of Edward Second. A great 
number of fruitful new laws came into existence under 
Edward Third, and on points of capital importance. 
The power of the people was more clearly recognized. 
They had shown their prowess on Continental fields, and 
the skilled archers, to whose English muscle the JSTor- 
man arrow had given a swift and terrible weapon, had 
won the day for belted knights at Crecy and at Poictiers. 
Even the enfranchisement of the villain-class was stead- 
ily advancing ; and the near insurrection, headed by Wat 
Tyler, only manifested in sudden and riotous fury the 
spirit which had long preceded and impelled it. 

The English language, now enriched from the French, 
came again to its place, not among the people only, but at 
the Court. In a. d. 1258, two centuries after the Conquest, 
was first issued a Royal proclamation in English. The 
Chancellor's speech was made in Parliament in the same 
tongue, a century later, a. d. 1363. But, a year before, it 
bad been ordered that pleas in Court should be pleaded 
and judged in English, though laws and records con- 
tinued to be written in Latin or in French. This was at 
once a sign and a stimulant of the revived national 
spirit, which had come once more to animate the king- 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 33 

doin ; and this had its ultimate menace toward the Pope, 
as well as toward immediate secular oppressions. 

The exactions of the Papacy in the thirteenth cent- 
ury had been nearly intolerable, in spite of the fact that 
Magna Charta had interposed its shining shield to pro- 
tect in a measure the national Church. The Norman 
work had been only too thoroughly done. The richest 
benefices were held by foreigners. One half of the real 
estate in the kingdom belonged to the Church. Yast 
sums were annually sent from it, to pass out of sight 
through the lavish treasury of Eome or Avignon. The 
finances of the Crown were embarrassed thereby, while 
the popular indiguation grew vehement and wide. The 
removal of the Papal throne into France, early in the 
century, had shaken the English allegiance to it. The 
long Schism of the West, which closed the century, in 
which England and France favoured rival pontifical claim- 
ants, struck a heavier blow at the popular regard for the 
ofiice itself. The drift of English legislation became there- 
fore sharply and stubbornly adverse at least to the secular 
claims of the Pope. 

In the seventh year of Edward First, the statute of 
Mortmain limited the acquisition of properties by the 
Church. In the eighteenth year of Edward Third, this 
was renewed and its execution more fully assured. In the 
twenty-fifth year of the same signal reign the statute of 
" Provisors" forbade Papal encroachment on the rights of 
those who should present to church-offices ; and two years 
after, this was brought to a cutting edge by the sharp writ 
of "Praemunire" — a barbarous name for a righteous pro- 
cedure — which was further defined and reinforced in the 
sixteenth year of Eichard Second, by what the Pope not 
unnaturally called " an execrable statute ;" which put out 
of the king's protection any who should procure at Eome 
translations, processes, excommunications, bulls, or other 
instruments, against the king and his dignity, forfeiting 
their goods, attaching their persons, and subjecting them 
to imprisonment at the king's pleasure. It was the flash 

Wycliffe. & 



34 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

of a naked blade, warning the Pope to keep his hands 
off from England; and this same writ of " Praemunire" 
became a weapon of terrible effect, two centuries after, in 
the furious grasp of Henry Eighth. 

It is apparent, then, that we at last have reached a 
point where many conditions were favourable in England 
to the revival of the earlier movement toward freedom 
in religion, and toward unhindered popular acquaintance 
with the books of the Scripture. Yet it must not fail also 
to be noticed that two forces were moving, distinctly, and 
with violence, in the opposite direction, which were in 
fact only deepened and made swifter by the general 
obvious progress toward freedom. The one was the jeal- 
ous, excited, passionate spirit of leading prelates, like 
Wykeham or Courtenay, whose power was still subtle and 
immense, and who were more strenuous for the spiritual 
place and prerogative of the Church, as they felt the State 
crowding upon their secular establishment. The other — 
in some respects the more dangerous force — was the jeal- 
ousy of land-owners, as the peasants around them were 
seen to be rising toward larger liberties. 

The repeated breaking out of the plague in England, 
with its terrible ravages — cutting off, it is supposed, nearly 
half the population — had unsettled all conditions of labour, 
and men were lacking to do necessary work, while harvests 
rotted on the ground, and cattle wandered at their will. 
Successive statutes, beginning in a. d. 1349, had sought 
to compel the service of labourers, and to regulate prices ; 
but they constantly failed, for forty years, and the fear and 
wrath of proprietors were aroused against the turbulence 
re-excited and extended by these very laws. Any influence 
which promised additional impulse to the peasant-class 
must therefore encounter their fierce resistance ; while, as 
I have said, the prelates, bred in the traditions of Eome, 
were only more watchful against every threatened moral 
assault because they had to yield and bend to the will of 
Parliament concerning the enlargement of their temporal 
estates. 



Oration, oy Dr. Storrs. 35 

This was substantially the state of England in the 
middle of the fourteenth century ; and it is in the midst 
of this excited, fermenting life — on the front of this old, 
yet ever-new movement, toward freedom, nationality, and 
a more intelligent popular faith — between these sharply 
threatening perils — that the figure of John Wycliffe con- 
fronts us. It is obvious, I think, that he appeared at a 
critical time ; that many forces had contributed to deter- 
mine his spirit and aims, and to assign him his work in 
the world; and that that work, although it came in the 
fulness of time, was one of the most difficult, as well as 
of the largest, yet entrusted to auy man. I think it will 
appear, too, that he was of singular fitness for it, and did 
it with a supreme fidelity ; and that the fruit of it never 
has passed from English history. In some respects, cer- 
tainly, his is one of the most impressive of all the figures 
which his time presents. The Saxon and the Norman were 
singularly combined in the great Englishman, at once 
scholar and statesman, philosopher and ambassador, devout 
recluse and determined reformer. And we, to-night, may 
well be conscious of real and rich indebtedness to him. 

The principal outward incidents of his life are suffi- 
ciently familiar. He was born in Yorkshire, not far from 
Eichmond, famous for its noble castle, on an estate which 
had belonged to his family from the time of the Conquest. 
The earlier elements of the English population had con- 
tinued in that district in larger numbers, and had clung 
to the old traditions of the kingdom with greater te- 
nacity, than in the midland and southern counties, though 
Wycliffe's own family, to the end of its history, remained 
attached with peculiar zeal to the Eoman Church. It 
seems, indeed, to have carefully covered the natural traces 
of his inheritance in it, to whose fame alone it owes re- 
membrance. 

In the year 1324, according to the common statement, 
or, more probably, a little earlier, the boy John was here 
born. Of his instruction in childhood, we have no special 
knowledge, as indeed he has told us almost nothing of his 



36 Wy cliff e Semi-Millennial Celebration, 

life, at any point, being too great for egotism, and too 
much engrossed with public work to perpetuate the inci- 
dents of his personal history ; but probably about the year 
1335, he went to Oxford, and entered one of the five col- 
leges then there existing — either Merton or, as seems more 
probable, Balliol, with which he was certainly afterward 
connected, and which had been founded by a family whose 
estates lay near his home. He was at the University a 
"Borealis," or member of the northern "Nation," which 
had its own Proctor, and which represented whatever was 
freest in the spirit of the place ; and the whole University — 
which was then simply a vast public school — constituted a 
democratic cosmopolitan society, in which knowledge gave 
leadership, and in which the scholars of different countries 
were equally at home. Eichard of Armagh, not yet Arch- 
bishop, was in Oxford at the time, of whom Neander speaks 
as " a forerunner of Wycliffe, by his freedom of thought ; " 
and Thomas Bradwardine had recently been there, who 
anticipated Edwards in his doctrine of the will, and whose 
vigour of character made all his speculation energetic and 
impressive. How far the young student was in contact 
with such teachers cannot be affirmed; but doubtless the 
fine and fervid spirit which emanated from them affected 
all minds as responsive as his, and all hearts as deeply 
touched with a sense of religion. 

He became, of course, familiar with Latin, as then used 
among scholars, but not with Greek, which was not yet at 
home in Oxford ; and the liberal arts, grammar, rhetoric, 
and logic — the " Trivium," — arithmetic, astronomy, geome- 
try, and music — the " Quadrivium," — we know that he suc- 
cessfully pursued. The physical and mathematical studies, 
indeed, appear to have had for him quite as strong an 
attraction as the logical and speculative. He passed from 
them all to the study of Theology, including the inter- 
pretation of the Old and New Testaments, as found in 
the Vulgate, the reading of the Fathers, and of the Scho- 
lastic Doctors, with the study of the canon law. That he 
studied also the civil law, then or afterward, is equally 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 37 

certain, with the history and the canonical law of his own 
kingdom. And these were to bear large fruit in his life. 

In such pursuits probably ten years were occupied, and 
by a. d. 1345, or thereabouts — the year before Crecy, four 
years after Petrarch had been crowned at the Capitol — he 
was fitted for larger University-work, as a teacher and a 
Master. It is not necessary to follow his course for the 
twenty years afterward, which were years with him of 
silent growth, in preparation for a service which he could 
then have scarcely expected. After a. d. 1357 he was for 
some time a fellow of Merton College ; in A. d. 1361 he 
was Master of Balliol ; and the same year he was nomi- 
nated by his college Rector of Fylingham, a Lincolnshire 
parish, which allowed him to continue in connection with 
Oxford. For a short time he was Warden of Canterbury 
Hall, appointed by the Archbishop, its founder, on account 
of his excellencies of learning and of life, but soon re- 
moved by the successor of the prelate; and in a. d. 1366 
he first appeared upon the stage of national affairs, and 
began to gather that broader brightness about his name 
which was finally to become a shining and enduring splen- 
dor. To understand his attitude and course, at that time 
and after, we must recall their particular and controlling 
public conditions. 

In the year before, 1365, Urban Fifth had made claim 
upon Edward for the payment of a thousand marks, as the 
annual feudal tribute promised by John to Innocent Third 
for the kingship of England, and also for payment of large 
arrears due on such tribute. Edward, in whose reign it 
had never been paid, referred this to Parliament ; and that 
body was assembled in the following May. Its prompt 
and emphatic decision was, that such a tribute should not 
be paid ; that John had had no right to pledge it, and had 
violated his oath of Coronation in the act ; and that, if the 
Pope should prosecute the claim, the whole power of the 
kingdom should be set to resist him. This defiant decision 
was sufficient for its purpose, and the claim was never 
again presented. From that time on, England stood free 



38 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

from any pretence of vassalage toward the Pope, and had 
its path more clear than before to future freedoms. 

It is probable that Wycliife was a member of this Par- 
liament, representing the clergy, or summoned by the king. 
He was, at all events, so prominent an advocate of its de- 
cision, that a champion of the Papacy made upon him a 
vehement assault, in reply to which he gives the reasons 
urged in Parliament, by temporal lords, against such a 
tribute. From these he concludes that the treaty of John 
had been invalid and immoral; and he so presents the 
reasons for this as to show his profound sympathy with 
them, if he had not himself suggested and shaped them. 
He calls himself, at the outset of his tract, u an obedient 
son of the Church of Borne ;" and such, no doubt, he then 
felt himself to be. But the vivid spirit of nationality and 
of liberty which appears in the tract, with the habit of 
referring to permanent equities as properly controlling in 
public affairs, was prophetic of much ; and the instinct of 
the Papacy must already have felt in him its future effect- 
ive and intrepid assailant. He was, at this time, you 
observe, perhaps forty-five years of age, a distinguished 
scholar, according to the best standard of the time, famous 
as a philosopher, an influential churchman, prominently 
connected with the leading University. Now that his 
spirit was clearly declared, equally fearless, searching, and 
sagacious, now that the expert and practised logician had 
shown himself also skilled in affairs, it might justly be 
expected that his work would widen, and his influence 
become a large and beneficent national force. 

Academical and royal distinctions soon came to him, 
as he was made Doctor in the faculty of Theology, and, 
perhaps, royal chaplain ; and in a. d. 1374 he was appoint- 
ed by the king a member of the commission sent to treat 
with a Papal embassy, at the city of Bruges, on matters 
of grave and long dispute. His name stands second on 
this commission, following that of the Bishop of Bangor; 
and the members were empowered to conclude a just com- 
pact on the matters in question with the Papal nuncios. 



Oration, by Dr. Starrs. 39 

The commission was associated with a large and brilliant 
civil embassy, at the head of which was the Prince's 
brother, the Duke of Lancaster, with the Earl of Salisbury, 
and the Bishop of London. 

Then, probably for the first time, Wycliffe saw a foreign 
city, and one which presented as striking a contrast to 
anything in England as did perhaps any town on the 
Continent. The busy, wealthy, populous Bruges was then 
at the height of its middle-age fame : with the picturesque 
building just erected, whose belfry-chimes still ring in the 
square, and are echoed in poetry, with twenty ministers of 
foreign kingdoms having hotels within the walls, and with 
companies of merchants there established from all parts of 
Europe; while, at the time of Wy cliff e's visit, were gath- 
ered there also royal princes and nobles of France, with 
prelates from Italy, Germany, and Spain. Wycliffe was 
brought there into closer relations with John of Gaunt, 
Duke of Lancaster, whose friendship was afterward im- 
portant to him ; and it well may be that a fresh impres- 
sion of the lovely and austere majesty of the Gospel, and 
of the simplicity of that earlier development of Christianity 
in the world with which his studies had made him familiar, 
came upon his spirit, while he saw, as in microcosmic view, 
the ostentation and pride, the practical unbelief, and the 
hardly veiled license, which were the abounding fruit in 
Europe of undisputed Pontifical rule. One cannot but 
think that many convictions, which were governing with 
him in subsequent life, took emphasis if not origin from 
his brief residence in the gay and luxurious Flemish town. 

The general result of the labours of the commission 
was not of importance. Some of its members were soon 
promoted by the Pope, and it is not perhaps a violent 
inference that they had been acting from the first in his 
interest. Wycliffe certainly was not promoted, save as he 
was lifted to fresh prominence and influence by the sharp 
prelatical attacks made upon him ; and this may warrant 
us in presuming that he had been faithful to king and 
realm, in the exciting scenes and service. In a. d. 1374 



40 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

he was made by the king Sector of Lutterworth, with 
which his name was ever after to be connected ; and, as I 
have said, the steadfast stuff of which he was made, his 
ability, euergy, and loyalty to freedom, were soon further 
tested in public affairs. 

In A. d. 1376 ,the Parliament, afterward known as " the 
good Parliament," was assembled, before which came the 
complaints of the kingdom against the Papacy, and by 
which these complaints were presented to the king. The 
continued intrusion of foreign clergy into English church- 
livings, the scandalous character of many who bought 
these from Papal brokers, the decay of religion consequent 
upon it, with the pecuniary exhaustion of the kingdom by 
the sums drained from it to be spent in dissolute pleasures 
abroad — these were some of the vehement complaints; 
and the fact that in England was a Papal collector, gath- 
ering tribute to be sent to the Pope, and claiming the 
first-fruits of church-livings, was specially presented, with 
sharp remonstrance. It is probable that Wycliffe was a 
member of this Parliament, and that its complaints were 
shaped by his hand. The very language in which they are 
framed seems marked with his idiom, and the relation sug- 
gested between moral disorder and the physical calamities 
which troubled the realm, is exactly in his spirit. 

In the following year, 1377, he attacked Gamier, the 
Papal collector, with indignant intensity, and, passing be- 
yond the subordinate agents, with profound moral earnest- 
ness he challenged the system which made them possible. 
He came thus at last into that personal grapple with the 
Pontiff which might from the first have been foreseen : 
maintaining that he can sin ; that what he does is by no 
means right because he does it; that he is bound to be 
pre-eminent in following Christ, in humility, meekness, 
and brotherly love; implying, plainly, that otherwise he 
is no Pope at all. The crowning doctrine here appears 
that Holy Scripture is for the Christian the rule and 
standard of the truth, and that what conflicts with it has 
no authority. He is steadily advancing on the path of 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 41 

the principles to which study, reflection, public service 
have brought him, without looking back. He has won, 
already, a high place in England, and he uses his power for 
freedom and truth with an unreserved outlay of strength 
which recalls the Saxon times and blood. It will evidently 
not do to leave him alone. At this point, therefore, breaks 
upon him the first onset of that Papal assault which was 
never afterward to cease to pursue him till his books had 
been prohibited, and his bones had been burned. 

In February, a. d. 1377, he was summoned to appear 
before the Convocation, obviously on account of the stand 
which he had taken against prelatical and Papal aggres- 
sion. When the Convocation assembled at St. Paul's, 
the Duke of Lancaster, and Percy, the Grand Marshal 
of England, with armed retainers, appeared with him, 
as friends and defenders; together with several personal 
friends, and some theologians who had come as his advo- 
cates. An altercation instantly arose, between the Marshal, 
with the Duke, on the one hand, and the imperious Bishop 
of London; the result of which was that Wycliffe was 
withdrawn from the tribunal without having had occasion 
to open his lips. Whatever purpose had been cherished 
against him, for the time at least had utterly failed, and 
he went out as free as before. Immediately, however, the 
English Bishops, or some of them, collected propositions 
affirmed to be his, forwarded them to Borne, and sought 
the Papal interposition. Of the nineteen propositions so 
presented, five referred to legal matters, as the rights of 
property and inheritance ; four concerned the right of rulers 
to withdraw from the Church its temporal endowments, if 
these should be abused; nine related to the power of 
Church discipline, with its necessary limits ; and the closing 
one maintained that the Pontiff himself, being in error, 
may be challenged by laymen, and overruled. The " power 
of the keys," according to this clear-sighted witness, is only 
effective when used under the law of the Gospel ; and no 
man can really be excommunicated unless by himself — 
unless, that is, he has given for it sufficient occasion. 



42 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

On the basis of these articles Gregory Eleventh, in 
May, a. d, 1377, issued five bulls against their author. 
Three of them were addressed to the Archbishop, with the 
Bishop of London, commanding them to ascertain if such 
propositions had been in fact affirmed by Wycliffe, in 
"a detestable insanity," and if so, to imprison him until 
further instructions; commanding them also to cite him 
publicly, lest he should seek to escape by flight ; and re- 
quiring them to bring the obnoxious articles to the notice 
of the king. Another bull was addressed to the king, in- 
forming him of the commission, and requiring his aid; and 
still another to the Chancellor and University of Oxford, 
enjoining them, on pain of the loss of all their privileges, 
to commit Wycliffe and his disciples to custody, and deliver 
them to the authorized commission. 

The death of Edward Third, with the accession of 
Richard Second, which presently occurred, and the spirit 
opposed to the Papal court which appeared vividly in the 
following Parliament, made it expedient to delay taking 
action under these instruments ; and it was not until the 
end of the year, after Parliament was prorogued, that pro- 
ceedings commenced. Meantime, Wycliffe had drawn up 
an opinion, for the king and council, on the right of the 
kingdom to restrain its treasure from being carried to 
foreign parts, in defiance of Papal censure. With utmost 
emphasis he, of course, affirms this right: on the several 
grounds of the law of nature, the law of the Gospel, the 
law of conscience; and it is not likely that this opinion 
rendered any less fierce the hostility to him which was 
already intense at Rome. 

A week before Christmas, the bull addressed to the 
University was sent to the Chancellor, with the demand 
that he ascertain if Wycliffe had propounded the alleged 
theses, and if so, to cite him to appear in London before 
the commission. The marked difference between this 
mandate and the sharper terms of the Papal bull shows a 
doubt of the temper which might prevail in the University, 
with a fear of probable popular sympathy with the accused. 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 43 

The heads of the University seem to have taken no action 
whatever on the Papal bull, but to have so far responded 
to the commission as to serve upon Wycliffe the required 
citation. Early, therefore, in a.d. 1378, the vigorous and 
undaunted theologian appeared before the Archbishop and 
Bishop, and made written answer for the theses. But he 
did not come in his own strength alone. He was now 
recognized as the faithful representative of a wide English 
feeling. The widow of the Black Prince, now Queen- 
Mother, sent an officer to the commission, charging the 
prelates to pronounce on him no sentence. The people 
of London forced their way into Lambeth Chapel, and 
showed their purpose to defend him. The result of the 
proceeding bore, therefore, no proportion to its threatening 
commencement ; for, though he was forbidden to teach the 
specified theses — on the ground that they would give 
offence to the laity — he left the court, for the open air of 
streets and fields, with his freedom unfettered, with his 
prominence and power only increased, by the futile assault. 
The successive attacks of those who hated him had given 
him a distinction which he never seems to have sought 
for himself. 

At just this time began that long Western Schism, 
in which Urban Sixth was acknowledged by England, 
Clement Seventh by France ; in which, subsequently, there 
were three Popes at once, almost equally detestable, with 
equal violence anathematizing each other ; and which was 
not closed till thirty years after WyclifYe's death. An 
immense impression was made upon him by this event ; 
and from that time, not ceasing to be a diligent scholar, a 
patriotic counsellor, a devout theologian, he more and 
more came to the front as a radical and devoted Church 
reformer. The thin, tall figure, the sharply-cut features, 
the penetrating eye, the firm-set lips and flowing beard, 
which his portraits present, the thoughtful, earnest, digni- 
fied presence, of which all men took note, were thenceforth 
to be found in the perilous van of the long English battle 
for a liberated Church and a Scriptural faith. 



44 Wy cliff e Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

In this supreme period of his life, a marked and even a 
rapid progress is to be observed in his judgments of truth, 
leading him toward, if not wholly to, the ultimate ground 
of the Protestant Eeformation. The Lutheran doctrine of 
Justification by faith alone, he never reached; but his 
mind detached itself rapidly and surely from many entan- 
gling previous opinions ; it sought for truth on every side, 
with eager care and fruitful fervour; and as fast as he 
reached any certain conclusion he flung the most strenuous 
energy of his soul into the work of conveying it to others. 
His time was short ; his work was noble and prolific. 

A skilful, acute, and practised logician, a realist in phi- 
losophy, yet a theologian largely made by the heart, he 
took Reason and Authority as the sources of all religious 
knowledge: "Reason" representing the intuitive and in- 
structed mind and conscience ; " Authority" representing 
the Divine Scripture. To the claim of the latter on human 
submission he admits no limit. It is superior to all tradi- 
tions and decrees ; the fundamental charter and law of the 
Church. It is a book for every man ; to be interpreted by 
the Christian for himself, with prayerfulness and humility, 
with a reasonable regard for the general Christian judg- 
ment of its contents, and especially for that of the great 
Church-Fathers, but with an implicit personal reliance on 
the present aid of the Holy Ghost to make evident its 
meaning, as Christ had opened it to His disciples. He was 
himself a profound and constant student of the Scriptures, 
quoting from them freely, showing comparison of part with 
part, and so saturating his mind with even their language 
that the Biblical phrase clings to his pen when it is set in 
freest motion. He sought always the spiritual sense, yet 
for that very reason was attentive to minute particulars of 
expression, and to the thought suggested by these in the 
highest moods of feeling. He found the very life of his 
spirit in the Word, and more and more, to the end of his 
career, engaged his soul in the study and the love of what 
he declares the most true, faultless, perfect, and holy Law 
of God. 



Oration, oy Dr. Storrs. 45 

In the doctrine derived by him from the Scriptures 
he was substantially Augustinian, though of unfettered 
thought, and differing at some points from the illustrious 
IsTumidian. The Law of God is to him the basis and the 
measure of all dominion, in the State and in the Church ; 
and in Redemption is the key to Creation. Salvation is of 
grace alone, not merited by good works, and the Lord 
Jesus Christ is its only Mediator. He is Divine in nature 
and work, yet also the centre and head of Humanity, set 
forth as such with manifold fulness; and the dignity of 
man's nature, with the realness and the reach of his moral 
responsibility, appears from the fact that a Being so august 
has intervened to redeem him. Of the Virgin Mary the 
utmost which he affirms, in later years, is that she was 
probably sinless, but that it is folly to contend on the ques- 
tion, since belief in her sinlessness is nowise essential to 
salvation. Toward homage to images, and prayers to the 
Saints, he became pronounced in his antagonism, discern- 
ing the danger of idolatry to the image, and holding any 
devotion to a Saint only of value as it may nourish piety 
to the Lord. He did not indiscriminately recognize Saints 
' — denying vehemently the power of the Church to canon- 
ize many concerning whose holiness she could not have 
been certain. He held the doctrine of the Church Invis- 
ible — the body of the Elect — in which the impure can have 
no place, however distinguished in prelatical rank, they 
belonging to the " Church of the Malign ants ; " and in this 
true Church the priesthood is common to believers, and 
every priest set apart to the office has right to administer 
all the sacraments. The celibacy of the clergy — though it 
was his own rule — he indignantly denounced, when im- 
posed upon others, as " unscriptural, hypocritical, and mor- 
ally pernicious ; " and if, as he conceives to be possible, all 
church-officials should give themselves to evil ways, the 
laity would compose the Church, and must displace and 
judge their rulers. 

Of only two sacraments does he treat, Baptism and the 
Supper; and against the doctrine of transubstantiation 



46 Wy cliff e Semi- Millennial Celebration. 

he flung his whole force, in reverberating assault. Till 
A. D. 1378 he had received it, as traditionally taught. An 
interval of questioning evidently followed. With all his 
power, in utmost energy of speech and spirit, after A. d. 
1381 he repels and denounces it: as contrary to God's 
Word ; contrary to the early tradition of the Church ; as 
pregnant with all evil effects; the most dangerous of her- 
esies ever " smuggled into the Church by cunning hypo- 
crites." He held in substance, from that time, the Lutheran 
doctrine of the eucharist : no local corporeal presence of 
Christ in the consecrated wafer, but a spiritual presence, to 
be spiritually discerned. Yet, though the glorified body is 
in heaven, and is not re-created by any priest, or bruised 
by the teeth of any recipient, there is a certain energy 
from it in the elements, as there is a certain presence of 
the soul in all parts of the body ; and the believing com- 
municant is the one for whom this has its efficacy. He 
finds no warrant for any sacrament except in express 
words of the Scripture ; and the preaching of that is to 
him a true sacrament. 

Very briefly, and of course imperfectly stated, this is 
substantially the doctrinal system held by Wycliffe, in his 
mature and final thought; and when we recall his resolute 
spirit, his fervent zeal, and sovereign courage, with his 
deep sense of the calamities of the time, and his hope for 
the final reformation of Christendom, we easily see how 
inevitably he stood, by reason of it, toward the Papacy, 
as an enemy, definite and unsparing; toward the Scrip- 
tures, as counting no labour too great, and no sacrifice too 
costly, for their widest distribution. 

In his relation to the Papacy three stages are apparent. 
Till A. D. 1378 he had recognized the primacy of the 
Bishop of Borne, while holding him by no means infallible, 
or possessed of plenary spiritual power, and sharply reject- 
ing his right to intermeddle with State legislation. From 
that time till a. d. 1381 he less and less esteemed the 
Papacy, as having any Divine authority, and came to 
think it desirable for the Church to dispense with both 



Oration, oy Dr. Storrs. 47 

Popes, then clamouring for allegiance. And from a. d. 
1381 to the day of his death, the Pope was to him the veri- 
table anti-Christ; the pontifical claims were flatly blas- 
phemous ; the Papal office had been a device of the Adver- 
sary of souls, and the homage paid to it was detestable 
idolatry. No words of the Eeformers of the sixteenth 
century were ever more sweeping in severity toward the 
Papacy than were the words of this churchman of Eng- 
land, this eminent leader in its foremost University, five 
hundred years since ; and all men might be sure that if 
ever a Pope should get opportunity, the sword or the flame 
would have one swift victim ! 

In connection with this assault on the Papacy he came 
to conflict with the Mendicant Orders, to attack whom at 
that time was to make the kingdom bristle with enemies. 
He had had with them mainly pleasant relations till a. d. 
1378, and had rather exempted them from the fiery cen- 
sures which he even then visited on the secular clergy ; 
but from that time, especially after a.d. 1381, as his opposi- 
tion to transubstantiation became more vehement, and his 
temper toward the Pope took on its intensity, he opened a 
combat with these Orders which only grew in its unsparing 
energy till his death. The absolutism against which he 
revolted had in them its ubiquitous messengers ; and he 
smote at them, as well as it, with sentences that cut like 
the blows of a blade. It was a combat from which they 
never fully recovered, and which their subsequent defend- 
ers and apologists have never forgiven. 

This was the necessary destructive side of his immense 
and incessant activity, after his work had fully opened. 
But the positive side, which gave to his efforts enduring 
and upbuilding power, was in the new teaching of Scrip- 
tural truth, and especially in that circulation of the Bible 
to which his whole character, all the aims of his life, and 
all his convictions, with a necessary force, inspired and 
impelled him. It is by this that he rises to real pre-emi- 
nence in his times ; that he suddenly consummates, in a 
supreme action, the long preceding tendencies of history ; 



48 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

tli at he hurled at the vast religious imperialism then domi- 
nating Europe the one weapon which it could not with- 
stand ; that he shot forth a force still felt in om' age, and 
which will not cease to extend itself in the world till the 
history of that has reached its conclusion, amid the ulti- 
mate prophesied brightness. It was his principal earthly 
work ; and it gives him his final and grand renown. 

I have spoken already of his fine and large acquaintance 
with the Scriptures, and of his profound spiritual sense of 
their majestic and tender meaning. It was always ob- 
served of him as a preacher that his discourse was rooted 
in the Bible ; that while others preached " chronicles of the 
world, and stories from the battle of -Troy," he clung to the 
Scripture, and derived from that his illuminating lessons. 
" The highest service that man may attain to on earth," he 
says, "is to preach God's Word." "O, marvellous power 
of the Divine seed," he says again, " which overpowers the 
strong man armed, softens obdurate hearts, and changes 
into Divine men those who were brutalized in sin, and 
removed to an infinite distance from God." He insisted 
on simplicity, clearness, energy, in developing and apply- 
ing the message of the Word ; on devout feeling in the 
ministry of it, since, " if the soul be not in tune with the 
words, how can the words have power ?" But ever it is 
the Word itself which is to him " the Life-seed, begetting 
regeneration and spiritual life ;" and in all proclamation of 
the Gospel the aim must be so to flash its light on the 
spirit as to bend the will to its obedience. 

Chaucer's picture of the good country priest, which has 
often been conceived to portray Wycliffe, represents him as 
diligent and benign, rich in holy thought and work, who 
has caught the words of life from the Gospel. Whether or 
not the poet thought of this special preacher, he has aptly 
described him. He had seen the Lord; and the words 
which he had heard from Divine lips were law and life to 
his enthusiastic and resolute spirit. He would make them 
the power of God to others. So he sent forth his itinerant 
preachers, without shoes, in unbleached russet, to traverse 



Oration, oy Br. Storrs. 49 

the kingdom, and to make these words familiar in it. 
Probably these went out from Oxford as early as a. d. 
1378 — many of them with no clerical ordination, "Evan- 
gelical men»," colporteurs, we should say ; with God's Law 
for their theme, their manner of preaching plain and sim- 
ple, their contact with the people constantly close. He 
who sent them was anticipating Wesley, in the means 
which he used to evangelize England. He was multiply- 
ing his voice a hundred-fold, and planting his convictions, 
with an instant success, in multitudes of minds. 

But now, as the greatest of all instruments for this 
supreme work, he would have God's Word itself translated 
into the common tongue of the people, and reproduced in 
manifold copies, till the peasant might have it, while the 
rich should gain through it a rarer treasure than jewels of 
price. This was not a mere measure of policy, for pro- 
moting a cause. It was the fruit of a Christian instinct, as 
deep in his soul as life itself. He had felt the inexpressible 
power of the Scripture, to uplift and expand, to cheer and 
inspire the human spirit. He had felt, as profoundly as 
had Bernard, the overwhelming sense of the awfulness of 
life in its relation to unseen eternities, and the supreme 
ministry of the Gospel to this. It was thus an impulse 
irresistible within him to make the message which had 
come from the Most High accessible to all, till precept and 
promise, prophecy and truth, should be to men a presence 
as familiar as the sunshine in which they had their physi- 
cal image. So he gave to his country the first English 
Bible, to be multiplied only in manuscript copies, to be 
read, perhaps, only by stealth, but to be thenceforth the 
possession of England, and to put an influence into its 
life, and into the life which has subsequently flowed from 
it, across either hemisphere, which cannot be outlined in 
any discourse, or measured in thought. It was not only 
the greatest work attempted in that age, and in its effect 
the most beneficent ; it was one of the most fundamental 
and momentous done in the world since the day when 
Paul took up his illustrious mission to the Gentiles. 

Wycliffe. 4 



50 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

Of the parts of the Bible known to the Saxons, I have 
previously spoken. It needs only to be added that the 
" Ormulum," so called, a paraphrase in verse of the Gospels 
and Acts, had been made in the thirteenth century, which 
seems, however, to have been confined to a single copy; 
that in the fourteenth century two translations of the 
Psalms had been made, and that these were followed, after 
a time, by one of the Epistles of Paul. But up to a.d. 
1360 the Psalter was the only book of the Bible rendered 
into the common speech ; and copies of this were certainly 
very rare. Within the next quarter of a century there 
came into the English language the entire Bible; and it 
came, by the witness of both adversaries and friends, 
through the impulse and the labour of the great "Beforcner 
before the Beformation." How far he himself translated 
its books is not wholly certain. That he did so largely, 
is undisputed. A Harmony of the Gospels, first translated, 
seems to have led the way to the rest. The Apocalypse, 
with its incessant attraction for spirits like his, in times 
like those, was probably among the first of the books to 
engage his hand. Others followed : most of the New Test- 
ament being rendered by himself, doubtless with partial 
aid from friends, the Old Testament, probably, in good 
part, by Nicholas Hereford, an intimate friend and co- 
labourer with him. Hereford, however, seems to have been 
suddenly arrested in the work, and the rest to have been 
done by another, probably by Wycliffe. 

Of course, all the translation had to be made from the 
Latin of Jerome, the Hebrew and Greek being almost un- 
known. It was, in other words, the version of a version, 
and so exposed to peculiar imperfection. But it must be 
remembered that Jerome had had early Greek manuscripts, 
earlier than any known until recently to the scholars of 
Europe, and that so in translating him Wycliffe stood at 
but one remove from the originals, while his perfect ac- 
quaintance with the Latin gave him ample opportunity 
to make his translation energetic and full as an English 
equivalent. He completed it probably as early, at the 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 51 

latest, as a. d. 1382 ; and copies of it were rapidly made, 
by the hands of skilled and eager scribes. But Wycliffe 
himself no doubt was aware that the work had been too 
rapidly done for its highest value or best effect, and 
planned the revision, at once commenced, which finally 
appeared from the hand of John Purvey, in A. d. 1388, or 
four years after the master's death. Of this, more than a 
hundred and fifty manuscripts still remain, in whole or in 
part ; many written on vellum, with elaborate care, to be 
the possession of churches, or of the wealthy, and not a 
few bearing the marks of long use, and of the concealment 
into which they were hurried in times of trouble. All these 
were written, probably, within forty years after Wycliffe's 
death; and if we remember what destructive search for 
them was made in the day of persecution, how many went 
across the sea, how many shrivelled in the fires of war, 
how many were burned, with those who had read them, 
in public squares, how many may yet wait to be discov- 
ered, we shall see how extraordinary their number at first 
must have been. Only a spirit intense and determined 
could have driven so swiftly so many pens. 

Of the effect of this translation on the English language 
many have written. The judgment of Lechler is undoubt- 
edly just, that " it marks an epoch in the development of 
the English language, almost as much as Luther's trans- 
lation does in the history of the German tongue. The 
Luther Bible opens the period of the new High German. 
Wycliffe's Bible stands at the head of the Middle English." 
The most recent historian of the English people speaks of 
him as the "Father of our later English prose." Forms 
of expression still familiar in our version come directly 
from his: as the beam and the mote, the trampling of 
swine and the rending of dogs, the Comforter for the 
Paraclete, the Saxon exclamation "God forbid!" Mr. 
Marsh may state the matter too strongly when he calls the 
accomplished and diligent Tyndale "merely a full-grown 
Wycliffe ; " adding that he " not only retains the general 
grammatical structure of the older version, but most of its 



52 Wycliffe Semi-Millenniai Celebration. 

felicitous verbal combinations, and, what is more remark- 
able, he preserves even the rhythmic flow of its periods." 
It may be said in reply, as it has been, that much of what 
is common to the versions came into both out of the Vul- 
gate, by which one was determined, the other influenced. 
Still it is true that what Mr. Marsh elsewhere calls " the 
sacred and religious dialect" which has continued the 
language of devotion and of Scriptural translation to the 
present day, was first established in England by the 
Wycliffe version ; and that what Mr. Froude has charac- 
terized as the peculiar genius, of mingled tenderness and 
majesty, of Saxon simplicity and preternatural grandeur, 
which breathes through the latest translation, had its ex- 
ample, and partly its source, in the earliest. Tyndale, 
Ooverdale, Eogers, Oranmer, the Geneva translators, King 
James's revisers, have all contributed something to the 
work, but they only heighten, without obscuring, its early 
lustre ; and the final revision for which we look, with all 
the aids which the most untiring scholarship has gathered, 
must still abide, in its vocabulary, and in much of what- 
ever charm it may possess through noble and harmonious 
forms of verbal combination, on the primitive foundations 
of five hundred years since. 

How vast the impression produced by the~ version which 
thus burst into use, not on language only,- but on life, in 
the whole sphere of moral, social, spiritual, even political 
experience, who shall declare! To the England of his 
time, confused, darkened, with dim outlook over this world 
or the next, the Lutterworth Eector brought the superla- 
tive educational force. He opened before it, in the Bible, 
long avenues of history. He made it familiar with the 
most enchanting and quickening sketches of personal char- 
acter ever pencilled. He carried it to distant lands and 
peoples, further than crusaders had gone with Eichard, 
further than Alfred's messengers had wandered. It saw 
again the "city of palms" in sudden ruin, and heard the 
echoes of cymbal and shawm from the earliest temple. 
The grandest poetry became its possession ; the sovereign 



Oratilhi, l)y Dr. Storrs. 53 

law, on which the blaze of Sinai shone, or which glowed 
with serener light of divinity from the Mount of Beatitudes. 
Inspired minds came out of the past — Moses, David, Isaiah, 
John, the man of Idumea, the man of Tarsus — to teach 
by this version the long-desiring English mind. It gave 
peasants the privilege of those who had heard Elijah's voice 
in the ivory palaces, of those who had seen the heaven 
opened by the river of Chebar, of those who had gathered 
before the " temples made with hands " which crowned the 
Acropolis. They looked into the faces of apostles and 
martyrs, of seers and kings, and walked with Abraham in 
the morning of time. 

They stood face to face, amid these pages, with One 
higher than all; and the kiugliest life ever lived on the 
earth became near and supreme to the souls which had 
known no temper in rank save that of disdain, no touch 
of power which did not oppress. Not only again, in lucid 
column, the pillar of fire marshalled God's hosts. Not only 
again were waters divided, and fountains made to gush 
from rocks. Angelic songs were heard once more, above 
the darkened earthly hills. Again, as aforetime, the Lord 
of Glory walked as a brother from Nazareth and from 
Bethany, strewing miracles in his path, yet leading the 
timid to the mount which burned with peaceful splendor, 
showing the penitent his cross, walking with mourners to 
the tomb. From the paradise of the past to the paradise 
above, the vast vision stretched ; and gates of pearl were 
brightly opened above the near and murky skies. The 
thoughts of men were carried up on the thoughts of God, 
then first articulate to them. The lowly English roof was 
lifted, to take in heights beyond the stars. Creation, 
Providence, Eedemption, appeared, harmonious with each 
other, and luminous with eternal wisdom ; a light streamed 
forward on the history of the world, a brighter light on 
the vast and immortal experience of the soul ; the bands 
of darkness broke apart, and the universe was effulgent 
with the lustre of Christ! 

Of course this influence was not all felt by many minds ; 



54 Wycliffe Semi-Millennia$ Celebration. 

perhaps not in its fulness by any. But it was thenceforth 
at home in England; at home, to stay. It smote with 
irresistible energy on the rings and fetters of Pontifical 
rule. It contributed a force of expansion and uplift to 
every soul on which its quickening blessing fell. It be- 
came an instrument of popular liberty, as well as a means 
of elevation and grace to personal souls. There was the 
English Renaissance! Leighton, and Owen, and Jeremy 
Taylor, became possible afterward ; Bacon and Hooker, 
Shakspeare and Milton, Dry den and Wordsworth, and 
Eobert Burns. The world of letters had found a lan- 
guage for the majestic periods of Burke, for Addison's or 
Macaulay's prose, for Gibbon's sentences, moving as with 
the tread of an imperial triumph. The world of life had 
received to itself a transfiguring energy. Celestial forces 
mingled thenceforth, more vitally, widely, with human 
thought; and the indestructible holy influence, though 
often interrupted, never ceased, till it came to its final 
inevitable fruition in the perfect liberty of the Scriptures 
in England. 

The subsequent months of Wycliffe's life were like the 
stormy afternoon, whose turbulence ceases, whose glooms 
are scattered, in the sunset's golden tranquillity. An eccle- 
siastical assembly at London— called by him " the Earth- 
quake Council," because it was shaken by a tremble of the 
planet — condemned his doctrines, but left him untouched, 
apparently because of the spirit of the Commons. Oxford 
repelled or evaded the attacks repeated upon him, but at 
last yielded to a royal mandate, and his long connection 
with it was closed. In November, a. d. 1382, he again 
defended his doctrine before the Provincial Synod assem- 
bled in Oxford, and again escaped personal sentence or 
assault. The weight of his character in the country was 
too great, his following was too large, to be challenged 
without danger. A vigorous memorial addressed to Par- 
liament, against the English crusade for Urban, was one 
of his last public papers, though many brief tracts were 
written and distributed to the end of his life, and his ser- 



Oration, oy Dr. Storrs. 55 

mons went forth as leaves on the wind. Three hundred of 
them still remain. He expected martyrdom, and others as 
surely expected it for him. But he was of that iron temper 
which fire hardens into steel. His courage mounted with 
occasion ; and he found it as true in his own time as it ever 
had been, " the nearer the sword, the nearer to God." In 
point of fact, he was never subjected to blade or brand. 
He wrought in patience at his Eectory, making it a centre 
of impulse to England. He stood to his convictions, 
whether the Pope cited him or not, though even the pow- 
erful John of Gaunt fell from his side, till a stroke of paral- 
ysis a second time smote him, as he was engaged in Divine 
offices, on the day of the Holy Innocents, at the close of 
the year 1384 ; and on the final day of that year, as reck- 
oned by us, he passed out of earthly struggle and care, 
and entered his immortal rest. 

Ladies astd Gentlemen: — I would not exaggerate 
anything in this man, but I am sure we must feel that it is 
with one of the heroical persons, making nations greater 
and histories splendid, that we have walked for a little this 
evening. Of course by his translation of the Scriptures he 
stands in most obvious relation to us. But the brightness 
of his fame in this connection may have concealed from 
the common thought the various and pre-eminent ability 
of the man, the large place which he filled in his time, the 
breadth and energy of his manifold influence. He does 
not loom into large proportions because we see him 
through morning mists. The more closely we study him, 
from different sides, the more surely will he win our ad- 
miring honour. 

It is not often that a man without note, except among 
scholars, steps forward suddenly to a principal place in 
public counsel. He breaks into sight, amid the turmoil of 
his time, as a pre-ordained leader, simply pushed to the 
front by an imperious impulse of nature. It is not often 
that a man addicted to subtle and large philosophical spec- 
ulation proves practical and acute in the sphere of affairs. 



56 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

He was recognized at first among scholastic philosophers, 
yet none surpassed him in political discussion, for force of 
statement, for grasp of principles, for sagacity or for 
daring. It is not often that one trained from childhood to 
familiar use of unclassical Latin becomes an attractive or 
a competent writer in a different tongue. He created an 
English style, rugged, idiomatic, whose sentences crash on 
the ear like grape-shot, whose words are half-battles, which 
has an occasional subtile charm, in the fine beauty of 
phrase and rhythm. 

Blameless, reserved, ascetic in life, he was humorous, 
too, with jests that were arguments, and with a severe, 
though a beneficent, sarcasm : as when it was said that the 
Scripture does not recognize friars ; " but it does," was his 
answer, " in this text, 1 1 know you not !' " He was radical 
in his views, in Church and State, while a revered leader 
in a great University. Of knightly blood, and bred among 
students, till his alleged errors were attributed by his ene- 
mies to his subtlety of mind and inordinate learning, he 
judged the plain people more correctly than themselves; 
he interpreted the prophecy of their vague aspiration, and 
was not afraid of the final effect of even their wantonness. 
He had a deep sense of human sinfulness ; but a nobler 
eulogy on human nature than ever was spoken was that 
wrought into action in his endeavour to make common to 
men the thoughts of God. The rector of a parish-church, 
he organized a mission which moulded the moral life of 
the kingdom, till every second man was a. Lollard. In the 
solitude of his study, he dared to question the faith of ages, 
to plant himself on spiritual certainties, and to balance 
his mind, in the tranquillity of reason, against the whole 
shock of church-authority. Apparently neither seeking 
nor shrinking from contest, he smote the Pope with tremen- 
dous anathemas, at a time when heresy was more odious 
than treason, and when reverence for the Pontiff was the 
religion of Christendom. With instinctive prescience he 
saw the immense opportunity of the time; and living in 
an age when prelates were humbled, and armies were 



Oration, oy Dr. Storrs. 57 

awed, before the impalpable power of Borne, without hel- 
met or mitre he stood invincible for pure freedom of soul. 

He was equally great in intellectual force, and in the 
more vital and sovereign energy of character and will. 
His whole personality went into his work, with an utter 
consecration. It was this which made him so momentous 
a force in the great discussion and stir of his time. It was 
this which set him in living fellowship with great souls 
of the past. It was not Bradwarciine, or Grostete, alone, 
whom he represented. The freedom -loving archbishops of 
England had in him an uuprelatical successor. Augustine, 
Bernard, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Lombard, their thought 
he had mastered, and wherever their spirit had been most 
royal he also had felt it. Even Dominic and Francis had 
given to him of the fire of their souls. The Saxon Church 
found in this priest of Norman descent the sympathizing 
champion of its long-struggling and unsatisfied zeal. So 
his life had the roots, and his influence took the reach, 
which transcend the limitations of individual force, which 
belong to essential moral powers, successively imperson- 
ated, never destroyed, and at home in all ages. 

The years which followed him in his own country were 
years of darkness, almost of death, to the cause with which 
he identified his life. Almost singly, for a time, he had 
held antagonist forces at bay. With the withdrawal of his 
grand personality, the powers which he had arrested for 
the time gained volume and velocity, while they learned a 
new cruelty both from previous fear and from later success. 
His followers were scattered, and multitudes of them were 
ruthlessly flung to the flood or the flame. In the Convoca- 
tion of A. d. 1408, it was forbidden to translate the Script- 
ures or to read any version of them composed in his time. 
After the Council of Constance, by which all his writings 
were condemned, his bones were burned, and their very 
ashes strewed on the stream, that Avon might carry them 
to Severn, and Severn to the sea ; but it was, as his disci- 
ples said, that the World might be his sepulchre, and 
Christendom his convert. There came a time, even in 



58 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

England, when the fatal laws against his adherents fell 
dead in their places, and when the almost anarchic frenzy 
which attended the long wars of the Eoses gave way to a 
peace in which liberty thrived. That was the time for 
which his quickening thought had waited; and having 
brooded silent in the air it then burst into voice, as if 
touching a thousand souls at once. Still earlier on the 
Continent, in Bohemia, and in Italy, had been felt his 
vast impulse. John Huss, Jerome of Prague, Savonarola, 
repeated the onset of his fearless spirit on the system 
which, like him, they fought to the death, with their differ- 
ing powers, with their equal consecration ; and no one of 
all died in vain. 

In a copy of the Missal containing the ancient Hussite 
Liturgy, in the library of the " Olementinum " at Prague, 
richly illuminated by loving hands, Wycliffe is pictured at 
the top, kindling a spark ; Huss, below him, blowing it to 
a flame; Luther, still lower, waving on high the lighted 
torch. It is a true picture of that succession in which 
others followed, with brightening lustre, this "Morning 
Star of the Beforination," till the sky was glowing, through 
all its arch, with the radiance of the up-springing light ! 

Out of that Eeformation issued the new prophetic age 
whose ample brightness is around us. It lifted England to 
its great place in Europe. It wrenched powerful states 
from the Papal control. It gave a wholly new freedom to 
spirit and thought. It filled this land with its Protestant 
colonies. It opens to us opportunity and hope. It is on 
the work accomplished by Wycliffe, and by those who fol- 
lowed, that our liberties have been builded. They are not 
accidental. They have not been based on diplomacies, or 
on battles, however these may have sometimes confirmed 
them. They have not been framed, in their solid strength, 
by the theories of philosophers, or the inventive devices of 
statesmen. They are founded on the Bible, made common 
to all. They have been wrought to their vast, enduring, 
symmetrical proportions — more lovely than of palaces, 
statelier than cathedrals — by their wisdom and patience 



Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 59 

who had learned from the Bible that human power has no 
authority over the conscience ; that man, through Christ, 
has inheritance in God ; and that, by reason of his immor- 
tality, he has a right to be helped, and not hindered, by 
the Government which is the organ of society. If the 
England of Victoria is different from that of Eichard Sec- 
ond, if the present Archbishop of Canterbury is a holy 
apostle by the side of Courtenay or Arundel, if the story 
of what the kingdom then was appears to men now a 
ghastly dream — it is because the Bible was made, through 
toil, and strife, and agony of blood, the common possession 
of the people who dwelt " on the sides of the North." 

Thank God ! that the Book, which at Oxford and Lut- 
terworth was first transferred, in its whole extent, to the 
English tongue, which this Society has so widely distrib- 
uted, and for whose final revised translation we now are 
looking, has been, is now, and shall be henceforth, the 
American Inheritance : expounded from the pulpit, taught 
in the household, at home in the school. It is not ours by 
our own effort, but by this struggle of many generations. 
It is not ours for our own time alone, but for the centuries 
which shall follow. The half-millennium which has passed 
since Wycliffe, the millennium since Alfred founded his 
"Dooms" on its Commandments, have not wasted its 
force. With a Divine energy it works to-day, on every 
hand, for grace and greatness. No future age will cease 
to need its law, and truth, and inspiration. 

To us is given the humbler work of making it general 
and permanent in the land, as others for us have made it 
free. In the measure of our indebtedness to them, are we 
responsible for this future. Let us not be unmindful of 
the great obligation ! Let us rival, at least, their zeal for 
freedom, their devotion to truth, if we may not rival that 
invincible courage which shrank not from prisons, and was 
friendly with Death : that these our years of noisy whirl 
may have in them still the moral forces which gave to 
theirs majestic renown; that the frame of free govern- 
ment, and of spiritual worship, builded on their immortal 



60 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

foundations, may be worthy the grand and costly life which 
cemented its base ; that the latest age of American History 
still may repeat those words of WyclhTe, written amid the 
heavy glooms which now are scattered, and in the front 
of menacing perils which now are not: "I am assured 
that the Truth of the Gospel may, indeed, for a time, be 
cast down in particular places, and may, for a while, abide 
in silence, in consequence of the threats of Antichrist ; but 
extinguished it never can be. For the Truth itself has 
said, ' Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words 
shall never pass !'" 



&&&X£BS T faj ©0*lIatxjfii ^uxUzx, %sq. 



Me. Pbesident : — I am assigned the duty of express- 
ing- the voice of this assembly respecting the address to 
which we have just listened, and I move you, "That 
the thanks of the American Bible Society and of this 
audience be presented to the Bev. Dr. Storrs, for his 
learned, masterly, and eloquent address; and that he be 
requested to furnish a copy for publication. " 

In view of the eloquent address to which we have 
listened, I might well stop here; but I am announced, 
and have been requested to follow this resolution with 
some remarks. 

John Wycliffe was the Martin Luther of England ; as 
great a man, I think-— a wiser, perhaps more learned, and 
one equally persistent and heroic. Both braved Papal 
power. Both attacked and defied the corruptions and 
tyranny of the church. Both took their stand upon the 
Bible as the only basis of religious belief. Both recog- 
nized private judgment as not only a right, but a duty 
and a necessity. Both, in a word, were Protestant; and 
of the two, until I heard the words of the speaker this 
evening, I was ready to say Wycliffe was the more Prot- 
estant and the more worthy of distinction, in that he 
preceded Luther by a hundred years, and in that he 
could only circulate the Scriptures in manuscript, and 
yet was the pioneer in the use of that great Protestant 
weapon, the open Bible. I believe that this act, the giv- 
ing the Bible to laymen, the making that open to all, 
which, theretofore, if open at all, had been so only to 
the ministers of the church, was the germ of the peculiar 



62 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

liberty, civilization, and progress which England and 
America most enjoy and illustrate. And therefore, I claim 
for the name of John Wycliffe a veneration equal at 
least to that which should belong to any other name in 
any period of English or American history. 

If men would know the meaning of the text, "The 
truth shall make you free," and of that other, "If the 
truth then shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed," 
let them look at these two great nations ; let them realize 
the difference between their freedom and that of those 
where the Bible has not been a fully open book. 

The struggle for that freedom began with the contest 
which Wycliffe inaugurated. For years that struggle 
continued, until at last government and people united, 
and an " open Bible * became the law of England. Then, 
just then, did the germ sprout. Then is the first recog- 
nizable impetus towards English greatness. Increased 
and strengthened with time, it was given to the genera- 
tion which settled America. Bible freedom — that freedom 
which combines reverence and duty to God with the 
assertion of the rights and the brotherhood of man — was 
the freedom which the earliest settlers brought hither, and 
for which those whom they left behind cherished and 
struggled. Producing, naturally, the grandest character, 
it pervaded succeeding generations, following for the most 
X>art the same course of thought and practice, and from 
which, from time to time, successive colonies came. The 
England of to-day is the England first fairly developed 
in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, and which has since 
only been modified, never fully changed. The America 
of to-day is great and worthy just in proportion as it 
adheres to the principles of its originators. 

The great feature of the period during which occurred 
the settlement of America, especially during that rang- 
ing between the middle of the reign of Elizabeth and 
the meeting of the Long Parliament, was the supremacy 
attained by the Bible. Says the eloquent historian of the 
English people, "England became the people of a book, 



Address, ~by Corilandt ParTcer, Esq. 63 

and that book was the Bible. It was as yet the one 
English book which was familiar to every Englishman; 
it was read in churches and read at home, and every- 
where its words, as they fell on ears which custom had 
not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a striking 
enthusiasm." "It was wonderful to see," says an older 
writer, " with what joy the book of God was received, not 
only among the learned sort but generally all England 
over, among all the vulgar and common people, and with 
what greediness the book of God was read, and what 
resort to places where the reading of it was. Everybody 
that could, bought the book or busily read it, or got 
others to read it to them if they could not read them- 
selves." " The effect of the book on the character of the 
people at large," continues Mr. Green, "was simply 
amazing; the whole temper of the nation was changed. 
A new conception of life and of man superseded the old. 
A new moral and religious impulse spread through every 
class. Literature reflected the general tendency of the 
times." "Theology rules there," said Grotius. "The 
whole nation became in fact a church." 

Out of all this, and under the action of many wonder- 
ful changes and providences, upon which we can look 
back now and plainly see that the hand of the Almighty 
directed; with bluff* King Harry fighting with the Pope 
and appealing to the Word against him, his very self-will 
and sensuality thus giving aid to the triumph of the open 
Bible ; with lovely Edward piously giving himself up to the 
completion of the Reformation; with Mary and Philip fanat- 
ically persecuting and lighting the fires of Smithfield and 
Oxford ; with Elizabeth in her turn contending with Spain, 
and through the aid of Providence, seeing the great hostile 
Armada perish — out of all this, I say, was evolved the 
Puritan ; not the grim precisian, morose, ascetic, penuri- 
ous, canting, and hypocritical, which that word ordinarily 
calls up and describes, and which in later years too often 
claimed the title; but the true and original Puritan, who 
was not necessarily or at first even a separatist, but 



64 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

adhered to the church and its ministers, and sought 
honestly to reform, not to destroy. "It was a name," 
says Fuller, "used to stigmatize those who endeavoured 
in their devotions to accompany the minister with a pure 
heart, and who were remarkably holy in their conversa- 
tion." Greatest among this class was the new conception 
of social equality. Their common call, their brotherhood 
in Christ, annihilated in the mind of the Puritans that 
overpowering sense of social distinctions which character- 
ized a preceding age. The meanest peasant felt himself 
ennobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recog- 
nized a spiritual equality in the poorest saint. Of one 
of the representative men it is written : " He had a loving 
and sweet courtesy to the poorest ; he never disdained the 
meanest nor nattered the greatest." 

The gardener seeking successfully to propagate a noble 
plant, chooses the best stock at its healthiest prime, and 
then selecting the most promising bud, fullest of sap and 
vitality, he severs it, and carefully carrying and nursing 
it, in due time grafts it on some other hardy stock, assured 
that it will permeate and renew it. And so the Divine 
Gardener and Creator selected the exact moment when 
the open Bible had done its noblest work, developed and 
built up the purest and holiest character, and then per- 
mitting wrongs and conditions likely to effect that object, 
he directed an emigration, a conveying of the best of 
England to the distant wilderness, there to grow into a 
nation, like the other yet even more progressive; of ,a 
freedom similar though perhaps more self-asserting — likely 
to produce a type of men with more active energy than 
that of those who remained; a nation which, daughter 
of England not only, but a child of England's special 
freedom — the freedom of the open Bible — would take its 
place beside her as a bulwark of tolerant Christianity, a 
dispenser through all ages of the blessings to mankind 
which naturally spring therefrom. ~No thoughtful man 
can fail to note the difference between the motives 
which generally brought the first settlers to America and 



Address, ly Cortlandt Parker, Esq. 65 

those which attracted other emigrations. It was lust of 
gold which led the Spanish to Mexico and Peru and 
Cuba, though mingled with the stern missionary martyr 
spirit which distinguished Jesuit self-sacrifice. It was 
lust of gold which in our day settled California and 
Australia. It was lust of wealth and power which made 
Great Britain mistress of the Indies. But with those 
who from 1610 to 1700, when large emigration well-nigh 
ceased, defied the storms and sought America, whence- 
soever they came, and with scarce an exception, whether 
from Holland, Sweden, Denmark, or England, the motive 
of expatriation was the full enjoyment of Bible freedom 
— of the right, that is, to believe and act upon their 
belief of what it teaches — to enjoy the freedom of which 
the Bible tells and which it prompts — a freedom which 
establishes social equality among all men, combined with 
and because of subjection to the law of God; a freedom 
which implies law, self-restraint, love, and regard of one's 
neighbour, mutual respect among all citizens; a freedom 
which prompts activity, self-improvement, progress; a 
freedom different in character from that which consists 
with Atheism, Theism, or irreligion, precisely in that point 
which has made these two nations so progressive — to wit, 
that, according to its doctrines, man is intrinsically so 
capable of elevation that it is his duty ever to seek it. 
I call it " the freedom of the open Bible," in which phrase 
are two great doctrines : first, that it is not, as with many, 
merely a book, however to be admired and comparatively 
regarded, but the Bible — authoritative, true, supreme; 
next, that it is to be open — open to all, not to be kept 
for sacerdotal or other exposition merely — not to be fol- 
lowed in the way of some rather than of others, but for 
each human being to follow in his own way, according 
to private judgment, with such wisdom as he can acquire 
and on his own responsibility. Worshipful reverence for 
the Book, combined with toleration towards all who con- 
scientiously follow it, whatever their differences, and 
with pitiful regard to such as conscientiously and respect- 

Wycliflte. O 



66 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration, 

fully impugn it; — this is the foundation of the freedom 
which has done such great things for England and 
America, and through them, for the world. 

Honour then, and grateful memory and reverence for 
him who first opened to England the Bible, translated it 
into his native tongue, and started its circulation among 
the "plain people." Honour next to him, to Tyndale, and 
Ooverdale, and Oranmer, and all the worthies who with 
him or after him completed the opening which he began. 
Honour to English law and to English Protestantism, and 
let me add, notably among its promoters, to the Church,, 
the great bulwark of Protestantism whose liturgy forces 
on eye and voice and ear continuously Psalter and chapter 
on every occasion of public worship, and thus insures that 
this book of freedom should not only be open but be 
known. Honour to this great Society and its parent over 
the sea, scattering their millions of the holy volume, trans- 
lated in every tongue, providing thus for the dissemina- 
tion throughout the earth of Bible freedom. "Education," 
said Burke, "is the cheap defence of nations." He would 
have added, had his theme permitted, " Bible education 
is the only secure basis for freedom, civilization, and 
progress." 



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It would be difficult to express the deep sense of grati- 
fication experienced during the delivery of the eloquent 
address to which we have listened. 

Rich and golden have been the words of the distin- 
guished orator; and I rise to second the motion for the 
publication of the Address, so well proposed by Mr. Parker, 
one of our Vice-Presidents. 

The inquiry has been sufficiently answered, why we, in 
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, amid the blaze 
of our civilization, when, in the tongues of the peoples, 
the Bible is printed, circulated, and read in more than 
two hundred languages and dialects, should commemorate 
the achievement of that first English translation from the 
Vulgate of St. Jerome. We celebrate the natal day of 
that translation ; for Wycliffe was the chief pioneer in 
that group of worthies who have given to us our English 
Bible — the primary hero taking the lead. We owe to him 
an infinite debt of gratitude. He scattered the seeds of a 
golden harvest that after generations have reaped. His 
antique Saxon diction was the speech of the common peo- 
ple, and his rectory at Lutterworth was the centre of an 
evangelical movement to preach the gospel to them. With 
amazing industry and labour he completed his great work 
of translating the Scriptures ; and we go back to that far- 
off period of English history to mark the rise of a new 
era in the diffusion of religious knowledge. Again " the 
poor had the gospel preached to them;" and the way 
was being prepared for the great Reformation to come. 

Just as in the harvest-time we sing of the buds and 
blossoms of spring, of the toil and hope of the husband- 



68 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

man, and rejoice that the sun, the rain, the quickened seed, 
have clothed the fields and bent the bowers ; so looking at 
the hundred-fold fruits that have grown out of the labours 
of Wycliffe and those inspired by his example, we rejoice, 
in this spiritual harvest-time, over the beneficent and 
enduring work of those early heroes. 

An old poet said, "The flower has a divine secret to 
reveal ; it tells how moistened dust can be clad with the 
glory of heaven." Those antique parchments, moistened 
under the pen of Wycliffe, had a divine secret to reveal ; 
they tell how those scrolls, which he bent over so long, 
became effulgent with the glory of heaven. His version 
made a new sunlight amid the shadows of the age — a sun- 
light that betokened the coming of a brighter day. Could 
we exhibit his well-worn pen, or the scroll on which he 
wrote; or could we telephone to the ear those earnest 
tones as he read his new translation from his little desk in 
the church at Lutterworth, we might more vividly j)icture 
some of the interesting incidents. Professional copyists 
take down the words; throngs of listeners crowd the 
church, and bend toward the Eeformer like a field of grain. 

The men of that age had human hearts like ours, that 
pulsated with the same great needs, with the same great 
longings, hopes, and fears ; and they must have appreciated 
the priceless boon when they were permitted to read, or 
hear read, " every man in his own tongue, the wonderful 
works of God." 

Tacitus said, " I can come to no certain conclusion 
whether the affairs of men are guided by the immutable 
law of destiny or by the whirling wheel of chance." But 
after the New Testament translated by Wycliffe appeared, 
it is the testimony of an enemy of the movement, that 
" one could not meet two persons on the highway, when 
one of them was not a disciple of Wycliffe." A new reli- 
gious interest was excited. Wycliffe's name became a 
watchword. It rang far and wide through Europe. His 
version xuoved to be an engine of power. It awakened a 
spirit of inquiry, and scattered the seeds of that religious 



Address, by Enoch L. Fanclier, LL.D. 69 

revolution which, in little more than a century, astonished 
and convulsed the nations of Europe. 

A philosopher said, " Two things fill me with admira- 
tion and veneration : the starry heavens above me, and 
the moral faculty within me." But Wycliffe's version ex- 
torted a new cry: "That divine Word of Truth fills me 
with admiration and veneration. Give me that sacred roll 
that I may know the words of eternal life ; give me that 
heaven-reaching ladder that I may scale the skies ; give 
me that celestial light that I may find my way to God." 
Men found, like the wandering Israelites, the deserts of 
earth impearled with heavenly manna ; and, turning away 
froni the divinities of forest, sea, and mountain, they felt 
sure of this, that " the kingdom of God had come nigh " 
unto them. 

Hitherto the Bible had been a sealed book to the com- 
mon people; printing had not been invented. Even to 
the learned the Hebrew and Greek originals were unknown, 
and many questioned the stars and the dim light of the 
cloister to learn something of their eternal destiny. Then 
it was that Wycliffe's bold achievement met the great want 
of hungry thousands, and set in motion a resistless tide 
that moved on toward the great Reformation, and that 
resulted in the complete independence of the English 
Church, and of all Protestants of every name who speak 
the English tongue. 

If any one needs to be impressed with the providential 
government of the world, let him contemplate the effect 
of the translation of the Bible into the English tongue ; 
an achievement that more than Magna Oharta has met the 
want of the people, made the Reformation a natural conse- 
quence ; and that has accelerated the march, hand in hand, 
through the swift-footed ages, of Christianity and its con- 
sequent civilization, in whose blended light we behold the 
glory of the nineteenth century. 

The English Church, whose liturgy connects us with 
the far-off ages of early Christianity, had been founded 
centuries before Wycliffe's translation, but its prayer-book, 



70 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration. 

now the casket of so many jewels, had not been revised to 
its later perfection. Of course it had not been printed; 
and Wycliffe's New Testament became a new tie between 
rector and parish, and a common aid to religious worship. 
Every responsive voice was now a psalter of thanksgiving 
and praise, and every swelling heart a shrine of sacrifice 
and incense. Shadows of the Dark Ages began to dis- 
appear ; the hill-tops of human hope grew radiant, as with 
morning light; and the long-sealed wells of living water 
were opened anew, never again to be closed to the thirsty 
wayfarers of earth. 

If the Bible were like " a lamp hung at the ship's stern, 
as she is driven by chance winds over a tempestuous sea — 
warning of no peril ; lighting to no anchorage ; " but only, 
as other books, "casting its lurid lustre behind, over a 
white wake of receding foam," then, indeed, were there 
little occasion to commemorate its translation into the 
English tongue. Bat when it not only opens our vision 
over events of the past, but draws aside the veil of the 
future ; when it teaches us of God, our loving Father ; of 
Christ, our dying and risen Saviour; of the Holy Spirit, 
our help and sanctifier; when it points to heaven as our 
home, and to an eternity of happiness as our inheritance, 
then should we love the study of that book as the noblest 
of all studies, and honour the men and the means by which 
the incomparable treasure of an English version has been 
to our dwellings brought. In the ineffable attractions of 
that book, men are content with any temporal lot, for they 
find therein the consolations of an eternal hope. Let us 
bend our strongest efforts to circulate that book in the 
English language and all other languages, throughout the 
world, 

" Till Christ shall have dominion 

O'er river, sea, and shore, 
Far as the eagle's pinion, 

Or dove's light wing can soar." 

Mr. President, I second the motion made by Mr. Parker. 



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Now may the blessing of the Most High rest upon the 
American Bible Society and all kindred institutions. May 
He grant that His Holy Word may have freer and freer 
access to all kindreds and people and nations under the 
whole heavens. May He also grant that blessings in their 
rich abundance may come down upon the Bible cause 
from the exercises of this evening. 

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God 
the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be 
with you henceforth and for ever. Amen. 



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PROCEEDINGS 



AT THE 



WYGLIFFE SEMI-MILLENNIAL 
CELEBRATION, 



BY THE 



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Held in the Academy of Music, New York, December 2, 1880, 



To Commemorate the First Translation of the Holy Scriptures into the 
English Language % by 



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NEW YORK: 
AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY, 

INSTITUTED IN THE TEAR MDCCCXVL 
l88l. 



FBOM WYCLIFFE'S VERSION. 

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interprrtarioun. Iox2oti)t proptjerie is not broujt 
to bg mamma urille, but tyolg mm of (Bob 
inspirit roitl) ttje golg (Soost Bpaken. 

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